First Drafts
May. 9th, 2009 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyoutenshi posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
writersDo 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-10 03:15 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-10 10:25 am (UTC)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.