Low Hanging Fruit
Hi everyone,
Today, I didn’t have much time to write even though it was a Saturday. But I did have fun doing lots of non-writing activities—mostly family stuff so I don’t feel guilty. Family always comes first.
That said, I only identified and made revision notes for 2 micro-tension pages. I, also, deleted 57 words.
But what I found from these two micro-tension pages was super interesting. Even though I’ve done 7 drafts (this will be draft 8), I still had what I’d call two low hanging fruits on these pages.
Low hanging fruit is a term for using the first idea or expression that comes to mind while writing.
Usually, writers have a lot of low hanging fruit in a first draft because we’re just trying to get the story onto the page.
What’s surprising about my low hanging fruit is not their existence, we all have them, it’s that they survived seven drafts and I counted my draft which focused only on deleting words as one draft but it required six full manuscript reads which I named draft 6.0 to 6.5.
I’ve said this before, but I’m going to repeat it. I’m getting so much more out of doing a random draft than just identifying pages with no micro-tension.
My random draft so far has been good for identifying pages where my POV character is absent, it’s made it easier to find places to delete words and now, it’s making it easier to see what I can’t see when I read my manuscript in chronological order where the plot engine brings me along for the ride.
Both micro-tension (MT) issues that I identified, weirdly, have to do with fear. Not so weird, I suppose, because the first MT page is in my climax and the other is in my crisis.
They were both very complicated scenes to write because they’re action scenes and have a lot of moving parts.
When I was writing them and getting feedback from people on these isolated chapters, my most important question was: are they confusing? Sometimes, the answer was yes, and I was forced back to the drawing board.
So when I was writing each version (including the seven drafts and the times I revised these scenes in isolation, probably 15 drafts or more in total), my concern was to create clarity and later as I was deleting words to streamline it, my goal was not to lose clarity. And so my brain never noticed my low hanging fruit because they were super clear statements. No confusion, there. And, therefore, they passed with flying colors and made it into draft after draft.
My take away from this, is that while I fast draft and concentrate on the story, I don’t have the brain power to reach for anything higher than the words just above my head (or on the tip of my tongue or the front of my brain). With this in mind, while doing line level revisions, it’s important to be aware of this and ask in later drafts, can I do better?
Now that I’m not in a rush, when all I’m concentrating on are the words line by line, my task, I believe, is to ask: can I get a ladder and reach the hidden fruit at the top of the tree? At the back of my brain or at the very least, the deep middle of it.
Getting a ladder and reaching higher is always better. My two pages are better for it. My POV character, Ellodie, is still feeling fear. But now, she’s feeling a specific kind of fear that sparks off a second emotion which wars with it.
On the page in my climax, I’m no longer stating: I am afraid (actually my low hanging fruit was higher than this—yay, but you get my idea), now it is a nuanced fear and a complicated feeling. Can I feel fear and relief at the same time? Again, she doesn’t state this but this is the heart of the conflict. Relief and fear war because she’s still in danger but something triggering relief has just happened.
The main change, the new higher hanging fruit, doesn’t focus on the fear—sometimes to bring across an emotion, you can’t hit the reader over the head with it, that just makes them numb to it, you need to sneak it onto the page by focusing on something else—in my case focusing on relief and the dangers of feeling it in this moment, in this life-threatening situation.
Basically, I’m focused on the danger of feeling relief right now, because the correct and safest response, in her current situation, is fear. Fear keeps us alert and safe because it’s a survival mechanism. Relief is for later when the dangers passed.
That’s my conflict, but said shorter and faster because after all, it’s an action scene and I don’t want to slow the pace.
Based on my own realisation for these two pages, my advice to you is to re-examine scenes that you found difficult to write in the first couple of drafts, or scenes where your concern was about clarity or conveying complexity. Check the line by line language now that you no longer have those worries, when those old concerns aren’t taking over your brain.
Now that you’re not concentrating on doing the difficult stuff of the scene, can you raise the language on the page? Raise the line level tension?
Ask yourself: can I reach higher than that apple dangling just above my out-stretched hand? Can I take a leap and grab something more nuanced higher up, more emotionally engaging, or more tense?
That’s all for now.
See you tomorrow.
Happy writing,
Joanne.
Micro-revision draft: 57 pages
