#brussel sprouts shouldnt exist

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Outline: this is your shopping list, things you need and shouldnt forget. If you cant find one specific thing theres probably a workaround or replacement somewhere.

First draft: you are a nine year old with a hundred dollar bill at the gas station on a road trip. Go hogwild. Do you need the 3 lb. Bag of sour warheads? No. Are you gonna get it anyway? Of course you are. Get the soda and spicy peanuts. Get all six different kinds of doritos. You know what you really need? A souvenir refrigerator magnet. Write every possible scene that comes to mind. Does it make sense. Not a lick. I use emojis for dialogue tags and I way over use the work fuck. Write the fun parts. Enjoy yourself, writing is fun.

First draft, second pass: go back to your shopping list. Add brussel sprouts. Write the boring bits just enough to make them exist. It can be as simple as a single sentence that explains what happened to get us to the next scene.

Second draft: saute the brussel sprouts in bacon. Take your fun parts and wrap them around your less fun parts and make the boring parts less boring. (This is the hard part)

Third Draft: Nail it to a wall then back up and squint at it. Look at your big shapes and directions. Identify your arcs. Hack and slash and Frankenstein peices on to other pieces until it looks good from a distance.

Third draft, second pass: come back in close and mourn the disaster you've made of your masterpiece. Then start stitching up all the slices and gouges. Clean up your scenes and transitions and fix the multitude of continuity errors you just made.

Fourth draft: NOW you can Marie Kondo. If you've ever heard the phrase, 'kill your darlings' in relation to writing, you should know that was said back in the 1800s when spending 3 pages on some dark and broody metaphor on nature of mankind was the norm. Was it great to write and puffed up your ego about what an erudite artist you are with words? Sure. Does it belong in this particular work? Nope, give it the boot, it may very well crop up again later.

Fifth draft: I hate this. This is garbage. I am garbage. I have created an abomination and an affront to the written word.

Sixth draft: existential crisis over. Put it in a new font and triple space it. Comb for errors like picking for ticks on a dog.

Publish.

Six seconds later you will notice 87 separate glaring issues. Six months later you will read it, be amazed, wonder who wrote it and have another existential crisis when you realize it was you.

I have this nebulous idea that the Marie Kondo method actually applies really well to editing the first complete draft of a story and I just...could write a whole essay about it but that might be all there is to it? Going through part by part and asking if this sparks joy and dropping it mercilessly into the discard doc if it doesn't???