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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31429
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31429
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There is a fourth option you barely mentioned. Distillation.

You can try this on just a few pages, a chapter, whatever. If you think your writing is poor, do the whole story this way. First, make a backup of what you have written so you can refer to it later, in case you have any gems of description or metaphor you wish to save.

Distillation means reducing what you have written to meta-notes. About one note per 'block' of a single point. This could be even one paragraph, or one line of dialogue.

The note is **about** what you wrote, not the text of what you wrote. Try hard to make it **why** you wrote it. What were you aiming to accomplish? What did you want the reader to see or know? Why was it important?

If you have written computer code, think of the distillation as a comment on the code. The comment is "compute the alpha coefficient", or "Sort the records by name", the code is much more detailed and complex.

In distillation, do not gloss over too much. The point is to reveal to yourself the final details _especially_ of dialogue. Yes, the conversation between Bill and Karen should show Bill is suicidal and Karen learns this; the plot point is "Karen learns Bill is suicidal".

Thus a change occurs in Karen, and a change may occur in Bill [he has told somebody something he was keeping to himself]. These changes are the reason this plot point exists.

Think of the distillation as putting the story into English Outline form. The plot point is "Karen learns Bill is suicidal", but beneath that heading are indented bullet points about exactly how she learned this.

_[For background shown earlier in the story, I will make Karen and Bill former lovers, now friends, his contact with her is almost entirely these three running dates per week. For Bill, unknown to Karen, this is his deepest human contact, so the run is much more important to him than it is to Karen. Say they were lovers in college and haven't been for five years, they do have similar jobs and entertainment interests, etc. But the point of the story is not to get them back together.]_

So say I decided to make this reveal in a conversation. It needed to be a private setting, so it is in the park, in the gazebo. And they are trapped there by rain.

Why rain? It is a simple-minded metaphor for his depression. So rain threatens, when it starts, this is Bill falling into suicidal depression, and guess what? He is trapped by the rain in the gazebo, alone with his only friend in the world, and the setting prompts him to reveal something new to her.

So here are the indented sub-points. Also written like plot points. No description or emotion, just the facts of what happened.

- It looked like rain but they did not want to skip their jogging day, so they went anyway, thinking they could beat the rain. 
- On the way home, rain begins and they duck into the gazebo in the park to wait it out, they expect it will be over in fifteen minutes or so, and they have time today. 
- Nobody else is in the gazebo, and their conversation happens then.

So we have outlined a plausible scene that lets Karen learn Bill is suicidal.

But now we are at the point of actual writing description. Based on what was written, how does each of these bullet points play out? We do the same thing, like writing a book report.

For the first, "it looked like rain". Okay, why exactly?

- Karen exits her bedroom with her running shoes in hand, Enthusiastic about running, since they had to skip their previous date.
- Bill sits on her couch, his phone in hand. He tells her rain is coming.
- Karen is irritated at the weather. She doesn't want to skip yet another running day. 
- Bill agrees, offers they can try to outrun it. Foreshadow his depression, he has invested an hour in getting ready to run and coming over and doesn't want to fail at even something as simple as this. If they don't run, he just goes home and cries. His agreement on not skipping is strong, and his offer is a scramble to save their run date, he'd willingly get soaked over skipping.
- Bill shows her the weather radar on the phone, points out it is just one thin strand off the main storm, and couldn't last long even if they got caught.
- Karen looks at the radar on his phone. She doesn't detect Bill's desperation, but she really does not want to skip two runs in a row, and she does like Bill and talking to him about what is going on in the world. So she agrees.
- That is important to Bill, he feels a sense of relief. Something finally went right.
- Karen gets some towels to put near her front door just in case they DO get wet (because we will need them later). She mentions something about if they do get wet; for example at least she won't have to drive home wet. May be able to foreshadow Bill's suicidal reveal with that comment, or her own reaction to it. They are off.

No dialogue! Just a description of dialogue and the emotions that motivate it.

No 'writing': This may be derived from writing, but what you make in a distillation is **instructions** for writing.

By breaking what you already wrote down this way, into logical steps, you can now use these instructions to write.

Of course with this distillation, you may also figure out what is _wrong_ with the story as you have told it. If you cannot figure out WHY you wrote something or what purpose it serves in the larger story, it should probably be cut.

If your writing instructions do not show enough conflict, you should rewrite it: The conflict in my example is within Bill: He wants this run to happen, it is more important to him than Karen knows, and he doesn't feel like he can tell her why.

If you have a scene that does not seem to work based on these "writing instructions" then you can try to fix it, at this level.

I'd say let this sit for a few days (work on the following sections perhaps), but once the details of what you actually wrote have faded, try to follow your distillation and actually rewrite it.

A professional writer should not be afraid of discarding something that doesn't work and writing it over from scratch. Distillation is a half-way house between completely discarding it and trying to fix it line by line; it is a step back to see the shape of the forest instead of the trees.

And it lets you continue in your story, with the characters you like, and perform major surgery on it without just starting over from a blank page. You can keep the distillation that works. Refer back to the original if, in the rewrite, you have descriptions you like or word choices you like that still work.

Use your reference works to help identify the precise emotions driving the characters in each scene, and to help you better convey those emotions in the actual writing.

Original score: 4