First Drafts

[kyoutenshi]

Do you have any odd tendencies or quirks when it comes to your first drafts? Are they overly long, or a little too brief? Do you write them fast or slow? Are there any problems or tropes that you can't seem to stop from popping up?


My first drafts tend to have very 'flat' and clinical writing ("She walked to the door. She could hear a sound like running water."), miss out important description details (characters pick up weapons, keys, or even go through doors that weren't there before), and I hardly ever touch on any 'themes' or particularly deep ideas.

My aim for first drafts is basically to get my characters from start to finish with as little fuss as possible. When I sit down to do some work, I'll simplify that by saying I want them from event D to event E. I write quickly, refuse to edit, and only occasionally stop to ponder the phrasing of a sentence. Sometimes I'll even repeat an earlier sentence because I think it'd look better in this paragraph right here, rather than at the start.

They're also really short. I'm working on a novelisation fic right now, I've written nearly all of the high-tension scenes, and the only parts I haven't yet worked on are the sections where my portagonist has to move from danger A to danger B. I'm at about roughly 2,000 words right now. There are fics out there with chapters longer than that. I remember one of Stephen King's most famous pieces of advice was that between first and second drafts, you should lose about 10% of your wordcount, but for me it's the complete opposite.

Comments

[meoryn]

Do I ever. My first draft tends to be a very long, partly incoherenet sequence of events that jump a lot and will change their mind halfway through the writing. I'm the sort of impatient writer (and reader) who wants to get straight to the meat of a story and skip all that build up beforehand. So what I end up with is a story that starts out one way and is completely different by the last chapter.

When I edit, I have to rewrite at least 70-90% of it. My mind kind of works in this illogical order that skips and jumps merrily along regardless of any rough and messy guidelines I might have jotted down. So writing a guideline for me is pretty pointless because my mind resists the lure of actually following it.

Because I write mostly young adult fiction, my characters tend to become much wiser than their fifteen-seventeen years by the end of it. Also, I have noticed that I sometimes repeat myself (or as one editor said when they rejected my MS "trust that you have a good story without feeling the need to bludgeon the reader after the fact").

I am very much guilty of using the same word three times in a single paragraph and I have a tendancy to try and use lots of words other than "said" in a dialogue which I found that isn't sometimes wise to do.

Live and learn.

[fairjennet]

That sounds like a very productive way to write. I think I'm jealous.

My first drafts are almost completely opposite from yours. I start with a nebulous theme or idea and work from there. Characters and plot develop (or not) somewhere after the fifth page or so. I write slowly, edit obsessively as I go, and change the phrasing of almost every sentence at least two or three times. It's also preposterously long. I'll write three pages and only end up keeping one sentence. A 10% loss would be wonderful; I'm lucky if I keep that much.

Ah well, I guess every person's brain works differently.

[kyoutenshi]

To be honest, it's a little easier than normal with this piece in particular; since it's a novelisation fanfic the basic outline was already there, and I just had to add, delete, and screw with certain parts until they were, well...more novel-ish.

With original fiction, I usually start out with a character, or a cool concept I'm not quite sure how to employ. Depending on the idea in question, I'll spend anywhere from five minutes to five weeks before my first 'scene' pops into my head. I'll then write it down as quickly as I can, although I'm not one of those people who carries their notebooks with them very often. I'll visualise the start of my scene, and the end, and just plough through it as quickly as I can. (When writing an opening chapter for a random original novel idea that popped into my head, my mantra was pretty much "Meeting in cyberspace to Donna getting shot.") After that, I either ask myself "So what's next?" or, if that doesn't work, brainstorm until another scene pops into my head and write that, even if it takes place six months after the first.

Internally, I do have a compulsion to edit as I go along, but most of the time it stops me writing more than a few sentences, and often leaves me feeling quite flat. (I have very low self-esteem when it comes to my own abilities) I feel the need to grab a thesaurus or start brainstorming in the hopes I can find a more eloquent way to describe someone jumping out of a second storey window, and it really just cripples my productivity.

And yeah, people's brains definitely vary, which is what makes writing advice so peculiar. There are so many different ways to do things and so many of them contradict each other completely. It can be pretty daunting. Somehow I feel that like you, very few of my original words will remain by the time I've polished this up to standard. I'm just hoping the words I replace them with can be somewhere near as good as my heart wasn't them to be. And good luck to you, too. =)

Andf sorry for the teal deer, there.

[sterling]

I think Stephen King is a particularly prolific writer -- and for him personally, he knows he's on the right track when he loses that 10% in between his first and second draft. Don't compare yourself to him too much, you sound like your methodology is fundamentally different, and there's nothing wrong with doing something your own way.

That said, as long as you can add the important detail in a later draft, I'd say you're doing just fine. Some writers have to draft their work many many times before crafting a nicely put together piece.

My personal style is to get things written down as fast as possible, and to go back over things with a fine tooth comb until I'm happy with it. I even read the work outloud to catch awkwardness. If I stopped to try and add in every last detail on the first draft, I'd never get anything finished, and be endlessly stuck on details.

There's a lot to be said about actually getting the bare bones down on paper!

[kyoutenshi]

"My personal style is to get things written down as fast as possible, and to go back over things with a fine tooth comb until I'm happy with it. I even read the work outloud to catch awkwardness. If I stopped to try and add in every last detail on the first draft, I'd never get anything finished, and be endlessly stuck on details."

That sounds a heck of a lot like me, actually. I'm so perfectionistic deep down that if I tried to reach for the stars on my first draft, I'd just end up hopelessly disappointed in myself and come to a completel standstill.

[nerakrose]

i don't write first drafts...when i've written a chapter it's more or less done. when the entire thing is written i'll read it through and change a few phrasings, maybe a few details if i realise i'm repeating myself or something. then i'll send it to a friend to catch the awkwardnesses my eye doesn't see, but i never need to change a lot after having it revised by someone else.
frankly i've never understood the entire first and second draft kinda thing... at least i don't consciously think of them that way. i suppose that for me it's not so important to plot down everything first, but to complete each chapter until satisfaction until everything is written.

like sterling said, don't compare yourself to stephen king; the way you two work are fundamentally different and there's nothing wrong with doing things your own way if that's what works. :)

[evenstar]

My first drafts are...I don't know if this makes sense, but excessively emotional? Sort of...not overly prosy, as such, just...it's hard to explain. It's kind of where everything my characters feel according to their circumstances and settings just pour out onto the paper, 200%, right up until the very last word of the draft's completed.

After that, I'll shove the draft in a drawer/obscure folder in My Documents/etc for at least two weeks and just forget about it, let it sit -- then come back and start paring down scenes, fiddling with dialogue, adding this, taking out that...basically making it sound less like brainvomit and more like a bona-fide story. :) I think I wait because while I'm writing and especially when I've just completed a story, it's my darling and I love it and that impairs my ability to judge it critically -- I'm too emotionally attached after being right in the thick of it. Not the best trait for a writer to have, that...

[lilsneak]

Urgh, my frist drafts don't have so much details and can get confusing sometimes, because I'm never in the mood to use description, so all you get is dialogue here and dialogue there.
It's quite a bother fixing them too, because I never know when I'll change my mind and like, I don't know, a sentence that I didn't back then, so I always save the second draft as a double file. Pathetic, I know.

[kyoutenshi]

That's a lot like mine, actually. Mine tend to be more action than dialogue, but unless a particularly awesome turn oh phrase comes to mind (I remember someone telling me about a writer who'd used the phrase 'a bouquet of flames'), I usually won't describe the setting aside from something like 'They were in a small room filled with books.'

And it's apparently pretty normal to go back and forth between two versions of a sentence if you like them both. I remember I used to have a lot of trouble with mid-flow editting, 'The afternnon sunlight danced on the lake's surface. No, wait, shimmered. Then again, danced does have a certain ring to it...' Besides, as long as you're creating something, I don't think any part of a person's creative idiosyncracies are pathetic. We've all got our habits and quirks and it's what makes writing so interesting as a craft.

[niji]

My first draft is always very similar to the finished product. I basically just write things how I intend for them to be in the end, then read through it a few times. Sometimes in reading through I'll just tweak a few sentence structures or wordings, sometimes I'll add whole sections or paragraphs.

I'm sure this wouldn't work very well at all if I was writing a novel or something, but with what I do write it works just fine - generally the stuff I write doesn't even have chapters, and it tends to vary from things with less than 1,000 words to things with 16,000 (plus prequels and sequels).

[dameboudicca]

To me the first draft is not that different from later versions. Not that I don't have lot of things to fix after that, but still, you recognized the finished product in that first version too. For me the first version is about getting my point across, and the second to adjust the volume to the proper level needed to tell the story in the best possible way.

[greymanticore]

Hello there! I have a few quirks when it comes to my writing:

1. I am never satisfied with my writing and will often delete huge chunks of it when I become frustrated with it. Once I deleted the first 30 pages of my novel because I was dissatisfied with it and used the excuse that I was changing the plot. This is a common practice for me.

2. As for the actual process of writing: I am obsessed with page numbers. I will watch the page numbers in Microsoft word float by, which is good and bad. It's good because I can better pace myself. It's bad because I have to consciously work on my pacing and I become obsessed with it.

3. I am constantly telling everybody I would like to become a novelist (as a profession), but I hate the actual process of writing. What I really love is creating the story - the plot, the characters, and so forth. Writing the actual tale is simply a way of developing them better, which for me is the real reward.

There are probably others but these are just the ones off the top of my head :)

[ilthit]

I think your approach is sounds fantastic and I should try that out with my longer fiction! It sounds like a time-saving mesh between first draft and synopsis, and also lets you get the whole thing together with a proper ending fast so you can't get last minute writer's block.

I'm not entirely sure if it would work for me, though, as I tend to still work on, expand and modify motivation and plot while I'm writing the first draft and I sort of need to write it all out to figure it out. My first draft usually end up rather like my second drafts; the second drafts are just "fixed" versions.