My favourite edit is always the second redraft, after I’ve tackled theme (see The Ten Drafts of a Story Part 1 – Theme) My favourite because this is where, after the unmapped, unchartered hell of a first draft, and the brutal slash and burn of the first edit, objective truth comes into play. At last.

Much of writing is subjective – some people will like your style, others won’t. Some people will tell you to write in the present day, others prefer the 80s timeframe you originally had. Some love your heroine, others think she’s too cold/hot. But structure is a fact. Like scaffolding, something to cling to.

If I’m lucky, by the end of my second draft, my story will have a beginning, a middle and an end. In this second draft I break the manuscript into these four chunks. Four? Well yes, because a middle is twice as long as a beginning or an end. So one chunk for the beginning, two for the middle and one for the end.

[image error]I have a plotting outline and I feed my scenes into it. And then I look to see if I have the three most important plot points. Namely:

Act 1 Reversal (end of the beginning)
Midpoint (halfway through Act 2, also known as the point of no return) and the
Lowest Ebb (end of Act 2, marking the beginning of the end)

These three points are often referred to as crises. I think of them as zig zags – the action goes off in a different direction to the one we were expecting. At the midpoint we realise the character is fundamentally altered and things can never be the same. The lowest ebb is the moment where we most doubt our heroine’s ability to see the story through.

These scenes act as beats of a drum, signalling to the reader their place in the story. They’re crucial to structure – how else would the reader know when they’ve got to the end of the beginning? Or the beginning of the end? These scenes serve to reassure that they’re reading a story and not a mad ramble of unconnected anecdotes.