Creative Reflection: Living Lizzy
Stephen King suggests you write, put your first draft in a drawer for a few months, and then take it out again so it feels fresh while editing, and Anne Lamott wrote that you will always have shitty first drafts. Both of these bits of advice and information ring true (at least in my case). It’s your first draft that you need to get down on paper, so that you can go back and have something to edit. I had that opportunity for the first time. I wrote it, had it critiqued, and then had time to distance myself from my writing before I went back into editing. It’s through this process that you can see your writing grow – you can cut your “little darlings” (another Ann Lamott term) and get right to the good stuff, the important stuff. Which is why this process is so important.
Living Lizzy is a story written for my Intermediate Creative Fiction course I took Spring 2011. It was created based off of a “case study” we did on two different authors. They wrote shocking, but believable stories. My short story is about Joey, a rather smartass girl who just met her untimely death... and finds herself in the body of an old best friend. The story follows her progression, detailing how she deals with the situation.
If you take the time to read the first draft, and then the last draft of Living Lizzy, you would see the growth in my writing. The story went through various workshop reviews – the first being my friends, then the class, and then my friends once more. Through this process I found where my weaknesses were (which where specifically in expression and detailing emotions – my character, Joey, wasn’t torn up enough about her situation) and where I needed to develop more details so that the story would really come to life. Of course, there were also the other errors that I made, such as spelling or grammar, but those happen naturally and were easy to fix. It was the rewriting phase of storytelling that I had never truly gone through before.
Provided are links to PDF versions of the first draft, and final draft of Living Lizzy. If you take the time to even read just one of them, thank you. And if you have anything to say, feel free to leave a comment below.
I like how you share the plot synopsis and describe very concisely the skills you gained in the redrafting. a quote or two might be nice, for those who don't have time to read the full drafts!
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