Writing Craft: Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell

Matt Bell advocates three major drafts in novel writing in his craft book, Refuse to Be Done.
​He says: The first draft is to discover the book I’m writing by writing the book. 

• ​I try to never go a day without looking at the book, which seems to keep my subconscious working on it. 
• So often you learn what’s right only by trying more than one solution in the same document, remembering always that efficiency isn’t the goal; a great book is the goal.

For the second draft, he suggests a reverse outline:

• write a full outline of the novel, outlining what already exists.
• Once the outline is complete, I revise it, not the novel, until the outline becomes a plan for the better book I want to write.
• The aim here is to discover what you’ve already done and then think of how you might better take advantage of the inherent qualities in the structure
• The trick of the second draft is to recapture or re-create the magic that inspired the novel in the first place, but to do so with the fullness of the style you developed by the time you reached the end.​

For the third draft:

1. On your first pass, highlight in one color every sentence in which you explain something [exposition: try to streamline or eliminate]
   
2. With a different color, do a pass where you highlight every instance of backstory. [Try to streamline or delay/eliminate]
   
3. For your next pass, highlight the weakest sentence [or weakest clause in each paragraph: try to eliminate]
   
4. Next highlight the strongest sentence in each paragraph . . . lift the surrounding prose to the same level
   
5. Highlight any passages where you feel yourself being genuinely moved…feel some kind of emotional, intellectual, moral, or esthetic jolt [also note where you feel nothing]

I find this highlighting technique helpful in my own revision process, but many of his suggestions (such as retyping the second and third drafts from scratch) didn’t resonate with me.  I didn't purchase this book (I borrowed it from the library), though it did have a lot of useful ideas.
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His overall message: revision and rewriting are most of what good writing entails…the sustained and often small-scale work of making a promising manuscript better hour by hour, day by day, slowly but steadily moving it closer to your imagined ideal. Read more from Matt Bell on the practice of writing.

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