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• 13Jun2011

  Tom Palmer's writing blog - How I write: how you write. Part Six

  Posted by Tom Palmer

  “My first draft is about me writing a story – the second draft is about me making it into a story someone else will want to read”

  I have finished the first draft of The Squad: Black Op, the opening book in my series about a group of children who play football for England and are also spies.

  The first thing I do when I have finished the first draft is to send it to several people whose opinions I trust. They read the book and tell me what they like about it and what they don’t like about it. Some are adults and some are children.

  I always ask them to be as critical as possible. I want to know anything that they think I can do to make the story better, so that when people read it they enjoy it as much as possible.

  These are the things they said about Black Op:

  • although four of the main characters seem realistic, one of them doesn’t seem very real
  • some of the background to the story is very complicated and I need to explain it more clearly
  • I start too many sentences with ‘And’
  • there are too many short sentences and it makes it hard to read
  • one of the readers didn’t understand why the children were spies in the first place
  • they also went through the story and spotted all the places where I made mistakes, or used lazy words or where I got facts wrong

  All of these comments were really useful. It has helped me decide what to do. I have a month to make the changes.

  I think the important things are that I need to make sure all the characters are believable and that I need to go through the book word-for-word to iron out some of the problems they highlighted.

  When I go into schools teachers often ask me to explain to children that I have to rework a lot of the writing that I do, because they want you to do that with your school work.

  One thing I say to that is that my first draft is about me writing a story – the second draft is about me making it into a story someone else will want to read. And that means explaining myself better and removing all the bits that don’t make sense.

  www.tompalmer.co.uk

  info@tompalmer.co.uk

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Tags: Authors and storytellers, Boys Literacy, Key stage 2, Key stage 3, Schools & teaching, Sport, Sports, Writing

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