There's an interesting discussion going on in Novel Motivation at the moment. Sprung from Stephen King's assertion that you should take no longer than three months to get the rough draft down. And some fine writers have said that's about right. Emma D: Lord, how you got any draft of a book as complex as detailed and beautiful as MoL out in three months is utterly beyond me.

So I'm intrigued, planning to take the plunge and stop fiddling and editing en route...

How rough is that draft? Does that fast draft yield rich, intense prose or is it crud that needs complete revision?

How fledged are your MCs when you sit down to write that draft? Do they come to life half way through or do you know them before you set out?

Would love to hear from people who find that speed draft works for them.

Thanks,
Cherys

I guess my first draft would be what goes down in the notebooks - back in the days when I still used notebooks - and second draft would be the scenes transcribed, and largely rewritten, into Word. I did 70% of my first book by that method within 3 months, head to paper to screen. Filling in the gaps took an additional 2 years.
Now I type direct onto the screen. I'm not sure the prose is any more polished or just looks that way, but first draft is now when the wip's largely complete and I do the first print off - I guess I'm doing it back to front these days, PC to paper.
Whether gap filling is part of first or second draft, I'm not sure; it's sort of an intermediate stage.
Second draft is rewriting scenes and moving scenes around, fleshing out characters - I should have a pretty good idea of what they are like by the end of the first draft - threading in secondary plot lines, amalgamating characters if there are too many minor ones, working on the prose.
Third draft would be the proof reading.


- NaomiM

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If the characters haven't come alive during the first draft, it's doubtful I'd continue.

Cherys, TBH TMoL wasn't written in 3 months, because I was workshopping chapters as I went along, and so semi-polishing (second draft?) as I went. But the structure was pretty clearly planned from the beginning, which is what matters most (to me, anyway). So I suppose I could say the second draft was done in about 8 or 9 months. ASA I wrote straight onto the computer, and I know now that was a mistake - I should have stuck to longhand - and what with one thing and another it took well over a year for the first draft, and showed me that hell-for-leather in longhand still works best for me - it would be about 4 months, if I could switch the rest of my now much more complicated life off.

The first draft is very rough indeed. Rich, intense prose if my brain's working that way that morning because if I'm in the zone it does just happen. I wrote a long, climactic execution scene at the end of ASA (things always go quicker towards the end) in one take and it really, really worked. But that's rare. If I'm not in the zone some of it will be okay-ish, some of it will be the barest bones: who says what, what happens, etc. On that kind of day the blank facing page of my notebook will be full of things which say 'right idea, wrong words' or 'this is terribly boring' or even if things get really stuck 'they have row here...' or 'she does reject him but not like this...'. Or, less helpfully when I come back to it 'NQR', which stands for 'not quite right'. On the whole I'm an under-writer - things are too bony and need thickening up. Other are cutters - lots and lots of words, by way of finding out which are the right ones.

Emma

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I don't know huge amounts about my characters before I start - could probably sum character up in a couple of sentences, with an idea of job/background/upbringing. The rest just sort of happens.

I think three months sounds reasonable but, like so many other things, it depends how you write. And, I suppose, how you define ‘first draft’. To me, it’s just bare bones, and it looks like my method is very similar to Emma’s except I've always started out on a screen rather than paper. I make notes – general ones at the beginning or end of the draft, specific ones in their relevant place – in a different coloured font (easier now after Snowbooks Emma’s Style lesson), and, for me, the real pleasure of writing is building on that loosely assembled skeleton.

Thinking about it, I'm not always sure when the first draft is done and the second one starts, as I tend to do second draft stuff before the first is anywhere near a state that could be called finished.

Dee

Different colours sounds interesting.

I suspect in the days of typewriters it was easy to tell which draft you were on: either you were still scribbling on the MS, or you retyped. Now we can fiddle and whizz to and fro and so on, it's much more fluid process.

Emma

Starting my 3rd book has been very exciting - it's the first time i've ever just 'thrown down the bones' for the first draft - before i've buffed and tweaked and the first draft has taken 9 months. But having majorly rewritten my last book twice, i now have a sense of 'what's the point of perfecting anything as the final draft is going to look nothing like this one.'

I also have so much going on in this novel, so many layers and threads, that i just can't cope with writing it all down at once - not even the appearances of the MC's pet cat! I am going to have many aspects of the novel to flesh out after this draft is written - characters' various voices, settings' details, themes and leitmotifs. If i tried to do it all as i went along i could never face getting started.

I'm really enjoying this thread – it’s getting my writing muscles twitching!

This is very interesting and very persuasive. Off for an early night with Stephen King to see what he says exactly about that energy. I remember John Braine saying something similar in his how to book.
Thanks all,
C

I'm in bed with Stephen King, too, cherys, we must compare notes again, sometime.

This is another area where there can't be rules.

I take longer - considerbly longer - than three months, but my 'first draft' is usually the finished product. I write slowly but try to get it right. H&M in its published form is the first draft, plus one chapter and one other paragraph added, near the end. MTLL was the excpetion - but all I did was add bits, I didn't 'redraft' anything l'd written at first. I thought I was a freak until Susan Hill posted on her CW course to say she never does rewrites, she just tries her hardest to get it right as she goes through - and lots of other people posted in relief to say, so do they.

Rosy

That’s what I meant about it depending on how you write. First draft can be anything from rough notes to a polished ms.

We all have different time limitations too. Stephen King says he doesn’t stop writing until he’s done his daily target of 2000 words. Could be mid-morning or early evening. That’s fine if you don’t have other commitments like a day job, or children to look after, or all the umpteen other things that most of us have to deal with in any given day.

Dee

I didn't 'redraft' anything l'd written at first. I thought I was a freak until Susan Hill posted on her CW course to say she never does rewrites, she just tries her hardest to get it right as she goes through - and lots of other people posted in relief to say, so do they.

Yup, I read that too and I did feel Susan was taking the extreme scenario there. I don't know anyone these days who 'redrafts' as in completely 'rewrites' a first draft - especially when it's written straight onto the PC. Of course if it's a draft that's just been sketched out, so it's more of an outline, that's different. But then that's an outline, not a first draft.

- NaomiM

I know more than one writer who never moves on from a page, as it were, till it's perfect, and then scarcely touches it again, so you're certainly not a freak, Rosy. And it's not just a modern habit, though as Naomi says it's much easier to do that if you're working on a PC. I think it's Eudora Welty (someone in my Paris Review book of Women Writers Talking, anyway) who did the same.

The stages are much more blurred, but I do still think in drafts, because I refuse to let myself fiddle. The basic process is read-through-and-mark-hard-copy, put in those changes on screen (which may be quite extensive and involve lots of toing and froing), let it lie, print it off, and round we go again. When something occurs to me in the middle of the night or the washing - say, that a particular thread needs elaborating, I make a note but don't touch it until the next cycle when I'm doing everything else. That way I hang on to some sense of the overall shape and pace and structure, even when I'm down in the boiler room.

Emma

I think there is a strong compulsion just to tweek on the PC rather than scrap a scene and start afresh. You get some excerpts uploaded on WW which gathers a few general comments, and a few weeks later a revised copy is uploaded with a few lines and words changed here and there, when really you wish they'd take the essense of the piece and give it a good old rewrite. And I'm as guilty as anyone of doing that.


- NaomiM

This thread has really got me thinking, about the whole process of editing.

I am curious, those of you who think in terms of drafts and redrafts. Are you talking about (i) simply working over the language to polish it, because the first draft is very 'rough'? Or (ii) doing things like fleshing out motivation a bit more - layering in additional material to make the text richer and deeper? Or conversely editing out unnecessary waffle to make the thing cleaner and sharper? Or are you talking about (iii) actually altering what happens - adding scenes or altering the structure of scenes or making conversations take wholly different turns?

I'm curious, is all. I guess my first-draft stage is so laborious that I wouldn't expect to have to do (i). In fact, tinkering like that usually, I find, makes things worse - it becomes mannered or stilted and loses its spontaneous flow if I try to polish the way things are expressed. The changes I have made (to MTLL and a teeny bit to H&M, in both cases following advice from my agent) have been more along the lines of (ii) or bits of (iii), but always taking the form of adding, never altering or taking away what's there.

I'm not sure that I ever could do this sort of editing myself. I just can't see it. Obviously what I wrote is what I wanted to write - it seems kind of axiomatic. What I said made sense to me. I never seem to have developed that external editorial eye, as regards my own work. In the case of MTLL in particular, everything my agent said was spot on and he made it into a publishable book out of a naive mess. But I could never have done that by myself.

And, even for an editor I think I would find it incredibly hard to make changes along the lines of (iii) - especially anything which was aimed at altering the characters' motivations (as opposed to just fleshing them out a bit more). Changing bits of plot, yes, maybe - but changing my characters or why they do what they do - I just don't think I could do it. the only book where I've tried to work on that kind of edit for my editor ended being shelved, because it was just too painful trying to turn a book into something different from how I conceived it. (Which is why I am living in terror right now - in case my latest one comes back from my editor, any week now, with huge changes to be made.... I seriously just don't know if I have the capacity to do it.)

Rosy