DRAFT: Hopefully, your pre-writing has generated some interesting ideas.
- What are the interesting words and images?
- What different things does each reveal about the character who is speaking, or other characters in the scene, or the world of the play?
- How does each relate to ideas in other parts of the play?
- What part does this moment play in the overall effect of the work?
- Write a paragraph at a time, each paragraph focusing on a word or an image or an idea or a rhetorical or poetic device, to see what you begin to discover. How does that idea connect to other moments in the play?
- Don’t worry about connecting the paragraphs—not yet—just write and see what is there.
REVISE YOUR DRAFT: By the end of this drafting process, you should start seeing a pattern emerging.
- What cool idea about the whole play has emerged from your deep study of this small part? This will become your thesis.
- As you develop that thesis, revise and streamline your paragraphs so that you are arguing as powerfully as possible about that specific idea.
- By this time, each paragraph should start with an IDEA that is somehow related to the thesis. If you start with a quote, you know you're still pre-writing.
- Each paragraph should end with a powerful "SO WHAT".
- When you've found your way through your argument, you're ready to write the rest of your introduction and your conclusion.
- Hopefully, at each step, you will have surprised yourself.