Part SEVEN of my series of WRITING FROM THE BONES UP: How I Write.

Part one of what I call my ‘In the Skin’ draft. I go chapter by chapter and try add more heightened feeling and thoughts from the Main Characters POV.

For instance, I try take into consideration how long my MC has been without sleep, or food, how bad her injuries are, how annoyed/scared/desperate/despairing she is because of the actions of previous chapters and how that is currently effecting her and I tweak sentences or paragraphs here or there to better illustrate that.

For instance: In the grand finale is my MC feeling the thrum of adrenaline? The suicidal rush of having nothing left to lose? The shaking of lack of sleep?

READING OTHER BOOKS BEFORE MY POETRY DRAFT

Once I had written my first draft with all my dialogue and action in place, I re-read the first chapter of the Hunger Games specifically to see how Collins did world-building and description layering in that first chapter. I had a memory of HG being super spare on description but it turns out my memory was entirely wrong. Collins is so smooth it flows cleanly but on re-read its not sparse at all!

One of the Pitch Wars mentors I was hoping to submit to tweeted that they were looking for books like Six of Crows. That book had sat on my TBR list for so long I knew this was the time to read it. I read quickly, so 5 hours later, I was left with a massive book-hangover. It was so good, one of the best I’d read all year. But the world. The characters… Kaz and Inej… THE FEELS… I re-read the first few chapters to see how the world was set up, how the criminals hero’s were painted… I analysed deeply. I highlighted phrases and entire paragraphs that were so beautifully both building world and being sneaky metaphors for the characters inner-feelings. I kept those quotes in a document named ‘poetry’ and I read and re-read as I drafted my ‘poetry’ draft, to show myself what was possible, to remind myself how high the bar was, and to challenge myself to do better,

Another great influence was an adult literary novel that I was unable to finish because of content (I’m not a literary fiction type gal and I hated the story) but was pretty famous for its world-building of the victorian London underworld. That aspect of the book was breathtaking. And greatly influenced how I wielded my descriptive pen on the my next pass. Also a great point I heard recently on a podcast interview with Amie Kauffman and Jay Kristoff, Jay said that he tries to read outside his genre, otherwise he’d end up writing and sounding like every other YA writer out there. I think I managed to subconsciously do that when reading the lit-fic book. I found this so successful that I’m planning on doing it again each time I get to the descriptive pass in my next book.

I have an ever growing file called ‘poetry’ which has highlighted quotes from books I read where I particularly admire the descriptions or language. I re-read that file before diving into the second part of my poetry draft.

Part two of this draft takes ordinary action or descriptions and tries to make them more poetic or more reflective of a characters inner state.

EXTRA RESEARCH

At this point I had been simultaneously reading extra historical research on Victorian city life at night before I slept. I had created an encyclopedia of ideas, jobs, settings, and it was at this point that I inserted richer decriptions. I.e.

If I had previously had a my MC’s walking down a street, and described passers by in a very generic fashion, I now inserted specific passers by.

An apple seller became a street coffee vendor with an added description of his tools of trade. Empty riverbanks were populated by mud-larks braving the tide to find anything they can sell.

Fog became specifically thick, or sooty, or dark and ominous.