Drafting and Writer Expectations….

[Heliotrope]

So I go to my coffee shop last night with the expectation of sitting for three solid hours and getting a ton of drafting done. My head is practically spinning with all the inspiration and ideas and characterization and snippets of dialogue I want to include. I know this is going to be an easy night tonight, as the book is practically writing itself in my head.

Except it isn't. Trying to pull words from my brain is like trying to pull teeth from an alligator, and trying to organize said words into anything cohesive is like trying to herd cats high on too much catnip.

WTF?

In light of some recent posts about writer anxiety/self-loathing, I thought it might be healthy for us to discuss the nightmare that can be our drafting process, and how unrealistic expectations of said drafting process can be a recipe for total and utter emotional collapse (for me, anyway).

In order for me to maintain my sanity during the drafting process I think of building a story in the same way I would think of building a house: Foundation up.

Often times in my head I have the curtains picked out, the color of the walls, a nice table lamp and perhaps a piece of artwork... but this is surface stuff. This is all the pretty prose and captivating sentences and lovely dialogue that in itself does not hold up a story. Before I can get to all the lovely decorations I have to start with the heavy lifting.

- Structure.
- Tension.
- Theme.
- Set Up.

This means that typically my first drafts are a muddy mess of nothing interesting for at least the first few passes. Similar to how, if you brought a friend to see your "new house" in the foundation/pipe laying phase not only would they be less than impressed, but they would probably have a hard time imagining where the master bedroom is in reference to the kitchen.

My first draft is the "pipe laying", "foundation digging" phase. It consists of dry descriptions that come to me at the time, but also entire pages of no description at all. It consists of snippets of conversations that have no context or very little action and are for the most part "on the nose" and strictly utilitarian. It consists of characters going through motions with little attention paid to how the character speaks, moves, or looks. Basically, it is just setting down the structure so that characters move from point A (The Beginning) to Point B (The Conclusion).

Once the foundation and pipe are laid I can start pouring concrete and perhaps even framing. This is stage two of drafting when I get to start thinking about what the heck is going on. What do these settings look like and how do they matter? What are the people on the stage doing while they speak these isolated lines? What are they wearing? How do they behave?

This may take a few passes, as every pass builds on the one before it, slowly adding more and more detail, testing it gradually to make sure it doesn't collapse under its own weight.

Finally, on the fourth, or fifth, or the tenth pass, when I know for sure that the story is structurally sound, contains the proper amount of plumbing, and won't burn down from faulty wiring, I can start to decorate.

Of course, this is the fun part, but decorating alone does not a story make so I have to struggle through pass after pass of absolutely terrible writing before I can make it pretty. This entire process can be pretty demoralizing, and I must constantly remind myself that I'm not at the decorating phase yet lol.

How about you guys? I would love to hear about your drafting process! Maybe we can share some ideas and help each other out

 

[Chessie]

It's ****ing contagious. I swear it is.

I wish we could be at that coffee shop together writing and scheming lol. My drafting process is all over the place. BUT for the past 3 stories it's gone something like this: writing up a mock blurb, organizing scenes in Scrivener following my dandy plot beat cheat list, coming up with scenes that match those plot points, writing a sentence as a beat then writing the scene.

But I've been getting so stupid stuck lately that I've been following the scene/sequel method with desire, conflict, disaster. Pantsing just wasn't working for me anymore. I don't have the luxury of waiting out the hard spots. So I do a fair bit of brainstorming before writing the story, but just enough to get me going. I don't like a whole lot of information at the beginning. Then I draft in chunks, mostly linear. I've read that doing it non-linear supposedly works well but my brain doesn't function like that...so one straight line to the end is what I do. I'm a pretty quick drafter except for lately. Sigh.

Scene Sequel

How I write my scenes.

 

[Nimue]

I wish we could be at that coffee shop together writing and scheming lol.

I dream of an MS writer's group... There need to be better groups in my town.


I sit down with a vague outline, a hundred thoughts, and write from the beginning, straight through. Or more often, I don't. Because I'm a human-shaped blob of failure who has no idea what she's doing.

*tap-dances away*

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

The easier things are going in your head, the worse it will look on the paper. When your book is "writing itself in your head" as you say, you have these beautiful visions of what it's going to look like and your expectations are REALLY high. Then you put it on paper and it's dull and ugly compared to the pretty visions in your head and you're disappointed. Of course it's ugly. It's a first draft. But it was so much prettier in your mind...

Seriously, that first-draft-disappointment can be really crushing.

As for how *I* draft? Umm...It's a lot of trial and error, really. I'm definitely not a pantser, but, I don't outline either, outlines make me sick. I plan out things in my head and adjust my plan as I go. Also, I do a lot of revising as I go. When writing chapter 23, I might go back and change something back in chapter 6 and splice in a new scene at the end of chapter 13 to make chapter 23 make more sense. I'm continually combing over my draft for errors as I write it. Often, to get into the groove at the beginning of a writing session, I proofread what I wrote the day before. This is why it's so hard to hand my friends drafts. The manuscript is constantly changing.

Many of my fellow scribes seem to be very scientific about structuring and planning. Me? I'm completely bewildered by it all. Scene structure? Subplots? I don't even consciously consider these things. I've never even thought about structuring a scene. Thinking about these things seems to suck the life and vitality from a story. I always have to let the story do what it wants and the less I get involved, the better.

I figure that just because i don't think about these things doesn't mean I don't *do* them, though.

 

[cydare]

I go through an intense planning stage before starting my first draft, outlining chapter by chapter and scene by scene. Over the years my plans have become more and more detaile, to the point where they basically become drafts themselves. I outline as if I'm verbally telling somebody a detailed version of my story.

Once I finish the outline, I go back and edit it. Then I wait a little while, letting it sit, and edit it again. Then I'll start drafting, usually changing things as I write, and comb through my writing periodically with more edits.

Drafting scares me. I'm always terrified that I'll write something worthless, and get too far in the novel to salvage what good in it remained. So I sit with my hands hovering over the keyboard, staring at a blank document for hours and getting nothing done. Outlining to such an extent gives me a path to follow, and allows me to fix large structure mistakes before I start officially writing. That helps my nerves.

The downside of intense planning is that I tend to lose my love for the story when I actually get writing, as I feel I've already told it. I can get it back though, with determination.

 

[Heliotrope]

@ Chessie,

Thanks for the links! I like the AFW article, and read a ton of his stuff a few years back (he is the one who taught me the SnowFlake method, as I recall).

Do you use MRU's when writing your scenes? I find I struggle with consitantly thinking that way as I find it comes out sort of flat, not a lot of "voice", and how do I fit in bits of exposition/description?

Thoughts on that?

 

[Incanus]

I dream of an MS writer's group... There need to be better groups in my town.

There are so few of us, and the world is so large. Even though I live in a fairly sizable city, there's little chance that even one other MS member lives in the same place.

 

[Heliotrope]

Nim, I think about that too or a ms convention. I would love to just put faces to names and have a coffee with everyone and chat.

 

[Incanus]

That would be awesome, Helio! I volunteer my city!!!

But more seriously, the house-building metaphor is one of my favorites to use. I couldn't have said this any better.

The decorating stage is what I want to get to as fast as I can too. Showing the place before that results in a laundry-list of excuses-- Don't walk on that wet cement; don't mind the gaping hole that's going to be the kitchen; don't touch whatever that thing is, there wasn't enough tarp to cover everything; don't trip over the equipment lying around; etc.

Basically, you need a hardhat and coveralls to read my novel in its current state.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yep me too. I didn't even touch on last minute wall changes, bathroom makeovers, additions to the living room...

The list is endless.

 

[evolution_rex]

I'm starting the third draft to my WIP soon, but it feels like I'm just doing a new first draft. I found a lot of things I wanted to change for the second draft, and now I plan on completely changing around the structure this third time around. Because of these huge changes, I feel like I can't really improve the writing itself, so it's stayed at this bare-bone quality and that makes me very unhappy. I don't want to waste time writing in details of something if I need to make changes and will have to eventually rewrite it anyway, but I don't like feeling like I haven't progressed.

 

[skip.knox]

I just finished a 6000 word short story. Did it in a little over two weeks, a real speed record for me. For the first time, I kept track of my drafts. Was, in fact, careful to make sure I worked in those terms. Each draft was defined as "I've made enough progress that I can print this out and mark it up for revision."

Nine drafts. Nine, before it was good enough for me to show to my crit partners. There will undoubtedly be a tenth, at minimum.

Early on, all I had was this: the setup and the climax. Two dwarves wander into a forest. They run into a monster. Going into the forest was easy--they were taking a shortcut. We fantasy writers know all about taking shortcuts through forests!

But that really was all I had. No big swirl of ideas, no snippets of dialog, just two dwarves (who at first were hardly more than an excuse to get going) and the monster (who was really the star). I began writing, though, because I knew from experience that if I planned more than that, I would not only spend much time in not-writing, what I finally wrote would bear little relation to the outline anyway. Since my aim was 5000 words, I figured, hey how far could I wander?

Filling out the plot came mainly from asking questions. Why did they need to take a shortcut? What was their goal? What was their relationship? At the end, do they kill the monster? Does the monster kill them? Some other outcome?

But inspiration has to play its role. In the case of this story, somewhere early on I remembered my pixies. I barely mentioned them in another story, and since then they've been lurking off-stage. Once I thought about using them, they provided the key to the structure of the story. It would be scary, then comic, then even scarier. Without them to add a wrinkle to the story, I'm afraid it would have been rather plodding.

Anyway, for this story at least, I did not have too much trouble pulling teeth. The labor was to lay down that first draft. Just the plain old work of putting one word after another. A second hurdle was when I thought I had a theme for the story, wrote that in, realized that the story was ballooning far beyond the length limit, and had to cut it all back out again. Once I had done that, it was all wordsmithing.

Oh. I have a short version of all that. I wrote the bits that I could see clearly. Wrote those first, and trusted the rest would follow.

 

[ThinkerX]

I seem to be a bit different than many of the other posters here.

For me, it's scenes, almost like movie clips. Of course, much of the time, the scene is junk, shot from the wrong angle, adlibbing, that sort of thing.

When setting up a chapter, I make up a sort of paragraph or outline in which I describe these scenes in short phrases or one or two sentences, as well as their placement within the chapter.

Then I write the scene, using the POV character as the 'camera.' What they see/experience is what I write. Relating to internal thoughts is sometimes a problem.

Sometimes, my internal camera fails, and I have to improvise, one tortuous sentence at a time (like now). Other times I have to re-envision the scene. And quite often - though not as much as before - I write scenes not needed for the story.

 

[Netardapope]

I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to the creation of the first few drafts. I don't actually enjoy writing unless I'm creating prose that sounds good, or using a lot of metaphors. I feel that I have to do it this way because if I personally don't describe a scene in the best way I can in my current ability, I won't be able to sense the kind of tone that I'm going for. I hear that a lot of people are able to see the tone in a text without necessarily having the poetic prose written down, which is a skill I'm envious of. I'd be able to finish my first draft in half the time that I usually take if I could just stop whining and get down to planting the foundations of the story.

So I guess I sort of work in the opposite way as you. In my first go, I try to do everything in my power to do all that I want to do with the story (which may or may not be a detriment, give or take) and in the other drafts I zone in on particular issues that could use fixing. By then, I'll already have most of the prose that I want to fit in, and by the time I reach the final draft I would likely "pimp" out everything at the same time all over again. I won't argue and say that prose is more important than plot structure--in no way, shape, or form is this an acceptable way to look at it--but in my experience I can't enjoy writing without adding what you would call the decorations early on.