Hey Writers! Do you ever doubt yourself when you’re writing stories? Or feel insecure about the choices you make with descriptive language, characters, plot twists, emotional impact, jokes, or any other little thing?
Hahahahaha! I know! We’re crazy with doubt and mean voices that whisper nasty comments in our heads about our work.
But during these past weeks of revision on my middle-grade novel, I discovered a Whole. New. Mammoth Cave of Doubt. The Caverns of Revision Insecurity. When you’re revising, a change you make on page 52 can spark necessary rewriting through the whole manuscript. And revision doesn’t mean making one change! So the nasssty inner Gollum critic has TONS of new material to attack you with.
So I was hugely cheered up to find out recently that both The Lord of the Rings and The Sorceror’s Stone went through enormous revisions, complete with deep changes.
Here’s a quote from J.K. Rowling. I can’t currently find the exact source but believe it was an interview on Muggle.net. (ETA– Harry Potter expert, Susan Sipal informs me that this quote is from JKR’s website.)
There were many different versions of the first chapter of ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ . . . There were various versions of scenes in which you actually saw Voldemort entering Godric’s Hollow and killing the Potters and in early drafts of these, a Muggle betrayed their whereabouts. As the story evolved, however, and Pettigrew became the traitor, this horrible Muggle vanished.
Other drafts included a character by the name of ‘Pyrites’, whose name means ‘fool’s gold’. He was a servant of Voldemort’s and was meeting Sirius in front of the Potters’ house. Pyrites, too, had to be discarded, though I quite liked him as a character; he was a dandy and wore white silk gloves, which I thought I might stain artistically with blood from time to time.
The very, very earliest drafts of the first chapter of ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ have the Potters living on a remote island, Hermione’s family living on the mainland, her father spotting something that resembles an explosion out at sea and sailing out in a storm to find their bodies in the ruins of their house. I can’t remember now why I thought this was a good idea, but I clearly recognised that it wasn’t fairly early on, because the Potters were re-located to Godric’s Hollow for all subsequent drafts.
I love seeing that she originally envisioned so many key parts of the story so differently.
And here’s a heartening quote, from J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey, about J.R.R. T. finding his way plot-wise through The Lord of the Rings:
However neat the final product, Tolkien had no clear plan at all . . . It is an interesting, and for any intending writer of fiction rather an encouraging experience, to read through the selections from Tolkien’s many drafts . . . and to note how long it was before the most obvious and seemingly inevitable decisions were not made at all. Tolkien knew, for instance, that Bilbo’s ring now had to be explained and would become important in the story, but he still had no idea of it as the Ring, the Ruling Ring, the Ring-with-a-capital-letter so to speak: indeed he remarked at an early stage that it was ‘not very dangerous’ . . . Another element arrived at early on was the character who would become Strider, the Ranger, but in serveral opening drafts this role of guard and guide is taken not by a man, still less by one of the Dunedain, but by a weatherbeaten hobbit called Trotter, distinguished by his wooden shoes. . . . Christopher Tolkien notes that more than two years after his father started work on the sequel, he was still ‘without any clear conception of what lay before him.’ . . . Even by the time the Fellowship had reached Moria, Tolkien knew no more than his characters what lay the other side of the mountains. . . . Seven months after starting work on the Lord of the Rings, he complained that he still had no story.
An “encouraging experience” indeed! For some reason, I had the idea that most novels don’t change that deeply from first draft to publication. Maybe because it seems like lots of aspiring writers write something fairly quickly, sell it fairly quickly and then bang! just a few months later their books are on the shelves. It’s satisfying to see that two of the writers I most admire did not know where exactly they were going with those early drafts.
