Knowing Isn’t Writing
What the third draft is teaching me about motivation, characters, and the reader’s grip on the story
It’s been a busy week and a half. I’ve been quietly working through a chunk of admin, and a chunk of craft, and the two have ended up sitting next to each other in my head all week. So that’s what this newsletter is about: a return to Medium after I’d given up on it, and a return to the manuscript with a much sharper red pen than last time.
A Reluctant Return to Medium
I’ve spent the last week or so republishing my creative writing posts on Medium. We’re talking everything from about June or July last year through to now. For context, I was actually writing on Medium first, before I joined Substack. Then things happened.
The quality of the stories Medium was feeding me started going downhill rapidly. Clickbait. Rubbish, basically. Five ways to do this. Twelve top tips for that. Eight ways to do the other. It became a trap, and I gave up. Just stopped.
I never actually canceled the subscription, though, so the daily newsletters kept arriving. There were many days when I’d open one, scroll through it quickly, and delete it without reading a single article, especially if a so-called boosted article at the top was clickbait. It was tiresome.
What I’ve noticed over the last few months, though, maybe longer, is that the quality has started to climb again. Decent subject matter, properly written articles. Yes, I know there’s an algorithm that adapts to what you’ve been looking at, and yes, I’m aware that accounts for some of it. But even allowing for that, things had been pretty grim, and now they’re not. So I’m cautiously back in.
I’ve been slowly building back up to two posts per twenty-four-hour period. Another week or so and I’ll have caught up. Whether I keep going at publishing weekly on Medium alongside Substack will depend on Medium and the quality of what they keep recommending to me. We’ll see.
But no matter what I end up doing with Medium, Substack will be my number one priority for the foreseeable future.
One Post That Wouldn’t Just Republish
Most of the older posts have been straightforward. A quick caveat at the top, noting the original publication date and a link back to the Substack original, and away we go. If readers want the source, it’s right there.
But one of them, the very first piece from last year’s Novel November, dated 5th November, wasn’t going to work as a simple republish. Reading it back, I didn’t think it was very good. The content was there, but the shape of it wasn’t. Straight republishing it would’ve done me no favors.
So I did what I now do almost reflexively: I handed it to my writing assistant. He’s called Claude. I fed the draft in, explained the problem, and asked him to take a look. Out came a list of concrete, useful suggestions, and I spent a decent amount of time working through them, re-editing, restructuring, and tightening. The result is a lot better than what I started with.
For the rest, if I spot something that’s genuinely out of place, I’ll re-edit it. Otherwise, I’m just posting them as they were, with that caveat paragraph up front. Honest about what they are, where they came from, and when they were written.
Starting the Third Draft
In other news, and this is the bigger story, I’ve started on the third draft.
Two items emerged as needing serious work. One major, one minor, very irritating. The major one is character development, which I’ve talked about before, but apparently not enough, because here we are again.
I have my top five major characters, and there’s huge room for improvement: relationships, family, history, the lot. I’ve been circling this issue for ages and only now actually feel ready to do something about it. Some of it is the realization that you can’t write convincing scenes if you don’t know how the people in them would actually behave. The rest is just time and attention. There are no shortcuts.
The Antagonist Problem
The other thing that’s been annoying me is the antagonists’ motivation. I knew what it was. I’ve known for ages. The problem is, I hadn’t conveyed it on the page. Not properly. Barely at all, in fact. It got the same cursory treatment I’d given the grief of the wife who lost her husband: a brief mention, no real depth, no background. Nothing for the reader to grip onto.
And without that, what’s the point of reading on? The reader can’t ground themselves in what’s happening. The whole thing reads as lackluster and, honestly, boring.
There has to be a clear motivation for all of the antagonists, just as there has to be a clear motivation for the protagonists. Don’t you think? Whatever an antagonist wants, whatever they think they’re justified in doing, whatever pain they’re carrying, it has to be on the page. Not in my notes. Not in my head. On the page, the reader can see it, weigh it, and, ideally, feel uncomfortable with how much sense it makes from inside the antagonist’s skull.
That’s the work for this draft. Firstly, I have five major characters to develop, including at least one antagonist whose reasons need to resonate with the reader.
Dictating This One on a Dog Walk
Quick aside: I’m dictating this newsletter while walking one of the puppies, the West Highland terrier. I won’t tell you his name because it’s very odd. But this is the workflow I’ve been banging on about for months, maybe a year, certainly, since late October and November last year, when I finally figured out how to dictate fiction, scenes, and chapters, all of it during Novel November.
I’ve been dictating the newsletter for longer than that, but the process has gotten better and better. I genuinely can’t recommend it highly enough.
I am still curious about one thing. I’m going to ask my son whether there’s an Android equivalent to the iPhone Voice Memo app. The whole appeal is the simplicity: hit record, talk, stop. Then hand the file to Claude to clean up, strip the ums and ahs, and reformat. It’ll be interesting to see how well that works on Android. I suspect there’s something out there. There usually is.
A Short Week, Thankfully
I’m almost home with doggy number one. Doggy number two is up next, then the gym for a proper workout.
It’s a short week ahead, which suits me. I only work Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and I work in Belgium even though I live in the Netherlands. Thursday is a national public holiday in Belgium so that the office will be closed. Means I only have to work two days. And to be honest, I’m feeling it at my age. Even three days is enough. If I had to work five, I could; I just wouldn’t be able to be remotely creative on top of it.
Final Thoughts
A republish project, a third draft, and a dog walk. That’s the week.
The Medium side is useful, but it’s not the work. The third draft is the work. And the lesson sitting underneath all of it is one I keep needing to relearn: knowing something isn’t the same as putting it on the page. I knew the antagonist’s motivation. I knew the family relationships. I knew the grief. None of it mattered, because none of it was visible to the reader. That’s the gap I’m closing in this draft.
Have a great week ahead. A successful one, a fun one, a positive one. I’ll speak to you next time. Mike.