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The Genius of Later

David Gane
David Gane

Your first pass of a story is the closed-door session. It is the story session. It is about you listening and writing what you hear.

The challenge is to keep yourself out of the way. You need to ignore the nagging voice in your head that questions what’s going on the page. You have to put it off by telling it, “Not right now. We’ll sort this out later.”

Avoid challenging the story too much in the early stages. Let it play itself out and allow yourself to discover it. Afterwards, go back and clean it up.

The guts of your story happens in those early days. It is in the many rewrites afterward, that you’ll discover the genius of what you were trying to say.

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David Gane

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Co-writer of the Shepherd and Wolfe young adult mysteries, the internationally award-winning series, and teacher of storytelling and screenwriting.

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