Process Week Continues, + Birthday Greetings...

[j_cheney]

Happy belated birthday to dotar_sojat and more timely salutations to sarah_prineas and babarnett!

Ah now, on to the boring stuff.

Drafts.
ROUGH DRAFT
Some people produce a first draft. I produce a "rough" draft the first time out.

After I've got a basic idea of the outline of events in a story (and I do mean basic), the setting, and the characters, I do a rough draft. I start at the beginning and try to write straight to the end. Sometimes that doesn't happen. I'll get to a scene I'm sketchy on, and skip past it with just a few notes to hold it's place:

Imogen laid one hand to her breast, nerves suddenly making her stomach flutter. ANNOUNCER?
Mother Hawkes clutched her other hand. The trainers bolted away RACE RACE RACE

ANNOUNCER? RACE RACE RACE?

This is why I don't consider it a first draft. It's not really readable. Sometimes the ending is also sketchy, usually because I know I'll change things later.


FIRST DRAFT
After completing the RD, I usually let it percolate for at least a week. Then I go back and start inserting the things I need to clear up. I will probably have done some research between RD and FD, and usually end up slipping in a couple of extra scenes.

One of the things that's true about my FDs is that the setting and descriptions will still be lightly drawn. I don't worry about those so much here. They'll be fleshed out in the later drafts.

This is where I'll try to get the first readings done, though. To check out the story arcs, and make certain action and dialog make sense.


SECOND THROUGH TENTH DRAFTS
All right, a bit of exaggeration there, but I do like to keep tweaking. The bulk of description gets inserted here, what little description I do use. I'd say that most things go through at least four drafts before I consider them ready to go out.


So, how many drafts do you do? How many before you let anyone see it?

Comments

process

[safewrite.livejournal.com]

Lawrence, you sound like me. Only in my process the ROUGH draft, as you term it, is more of a bullet-pointed outline. First I write a basic story arc, then I decide little tings like who the characters are, and what POV & tense it will be in. Then I write scene descriptions. Each scene gets a bullet point. I then move the bullet points around until the chronology, pacing and flow look good to me. Like you, I may add a scene or two both at this point and later.

You expand from a terse RD? I expand each bullet point scene in waves. The waves consist of dialog, grounding, the five senses & metaphor/simile descriptions. When writing novels I tend to do the pivotal scenes first, because that way I can make the subplots dance around the pivots more easily so that everything ties together.

Re: process

[j-cheney.livejournal.com]

I write dialog and body language first, like blocking a scene. everything else seems to come later.

I don't know about pivotal scenes. If I write them first, then by the time I get to them in the plot, the plot might have skewed some, so I end up having wasted the time. I should outline better, but I don't seem to have a gift for it.