To write is to re-draft - Literature Talk by Sarah Braunstein

The talk which took place on the 26th of November, hosted by Professor Prajwal, revolved around writing- or rather, how to write. The speaker was Sarah Braunstein, a renowned writer and teacher. She has two published novels, with several of her essays and short stories appearing in the New Yorker and Playboy. They are all worth reading. 

As a budding writer in the audience who had several questions and anxieties about successful and excellent writing, the talk was more than satisfactory. A few of the topics that were in the half-hour talk were: 

'How do you draft good stories?' The answer is pretty simple. 

First drafts are terrible. Always. They are unpublishable, overwritten word vomits. No one expects them to be good. Good stories come from numerous re-drafts and revisions. As you rewrite and edit, the stories transform into something you can be proud of. The key is overwriting first instead of underwriting. The witty subtlety will find its way to your characters and you sometime during the revision- a collaboration between current and past drafts. 

Get to know your characters. Put them in different settings, challenge them and yourself as an author, and get attuned to points of view. This will give way to impactful dialogues and scenes. 

For Sarah, writing fiction gives her freedom and leeway. She can write and make her characters do things that she usually would not do on her own. Anything that cannot happen in real life can occur in the book- even the very grayest shade you can imagine. 

But how do you know when your story is finished? 

Well, you never know when your story is truly finished. And you certainly cannot keep drafting. Perfectionism may help in writing and generating stories, Sarah advises, but you will only know if your story is done with the help of readers. Read aloud and collaborate with them. As you do so, you will find 'subtlety,' balance, and unity forming between the poetic and boring sentences. Too much of one thing, after all, makes the story stagnant. The unity between the sentences and dialogues creates special impacts as needed. 

Lastly, while you write your story and move sentences around, a few things to consider are: Is it grammatical? Is it true? Is it necessary to the story? Is it giving new information- surprising or stagnant to the plot?

As we embark on our own stories and world of drafts and re-drafts, we should not worry about whether this plot has been done before. Or if you are copying from someone else unconsciously. We will turn out fine as long as we write in our own voice and understand that we all borrow from writers and get influenced (it's a part of the art).