First Draft Done - Write Club Update

Updates...

Since I'm unofficially participating in Write Club, I thought I'd post an update now that I've finished the first draft and submitted it for critique to The Writers' Block.

This first draft, though short (finally clocked it in at roughly 2,000 words), took me much longer to write than I'd planned. While the basic plot took me only about 20 minutes to spit out, the construction of the actual story became much more difficult. Not because I didn't want to write the story, but because of a few technical obstacles.

I previously talked about needing to research elephants in my last update, but something else that hung me up was Ellie's "voice". Her point of view.

Point of View

As you know, Ellie is an elephant. Although many children's stories involving fictional elephants have them talking, Ellie does not. So, my first hurdle was learning how to write from the POV of a character that didn't have any spoken dialogue. This is part of why I needed to do some research on elephants, so I could learn physical language, sounds they make, etc. I needed to know how she would interact with her environment and other characters without speech.

My next obstacle was the style of POV. I usually write in 3rd person limited using past tense, so I first wrote the story with that. However, as I was writing, it felt...off. And then when I was reading, it still felt...off.

I remembered reading a story on here written by @tinypaleokitchen, where she writes from the POV of a dog, using 1st person present tense. It worked well for her, so I decided to switch everything in Ellie's story to that. Instantly the story flowed much more easily, and it read even better. Having to be in the mind of a 7-year old elephant that doesn't speak, it made much more sense for the story to be written in 1st person.

Here's the opening lines, first written in 3rd person:

Ellie once lived in a very expensive and important zoo. If zoos were rated as were restaurants and hotels, this zoo would have five stars.

But now, here it is in 1st person:

My name is Ellie. I’m 7 years old and I live in a zoo. A very big and important zoo. If zoos were rated like restaurants and hotels, this would be a 5-star zoo.

First Draft Complete!

Now that I had Ellie's voice and was more comfortable being in her mind, finishing the first draft and submitting it for critique was much simpler. Now, I wait for it to be torn apart. Hopefully soon I'll be able to show you the final, polished version of "Ellie Finds a Friend".

If you ever need help brainstorming, critiquing, or just wanna chat with a bunch of crazy writers, come join us at The Writers' Block on Discord!

Image source: Pixabay

WRITE WELL AND STEEM ON!