Welcome to WriteOn!, the weekly series discussing writing in all its aspects.
Writing communities develop their own language, and it evolves over time. Sometimes, the jargon spreads, sometimes it becomes well defined and a reference for others, and sometimes it doesn’t.
It never hurts to clarify what one means when they use a certain term, especially if it’s not a long-standing, commonly understood one.
So today, I’m going to talk about my conception of zero drafts and how they fit into my writing process.
To me, first draft implies something reasonably complete. While I’m generally not willing to share a work until the second draft (which typically includes significant revision and editing), parts of the first draft should be pretty good, and as a story, it should cohere. This is the first time the story feels complete (which is different from done).
Zero draft is what (usually) falls out of an event like NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month), thirty days of madness and progress. In a dozen years of participation, I’ve only had two drafts that were closer to first drafts than zero drafts.
It’s a pile of words (and scenes), from which a first draft can be constructed. It’s me telling myself the story the first time to work it out.
I liken it to telling an anecdote that very first time.
I won’t belabor with an example, and, frankly, I’m bad at anecdotes. My father was good at them, though, and when I was a kid, he was a polished storyteller. It wasn’t until I was a teen and heard him building his anecdotes of stuff I had witnessed that I realized it was iterative. The first time he told a story, it was rough. Each time he told it again, it was tighter, more pointed. He’d drop a sentence here, add a quip there, tighten it up, focus on the point, find the timing and wording for maximum humor. Sometimes, he’d try it completely differently.
I’ve seen writers discuss their process, and they do this in synopsis or outline. Good for them! That’s a great use of planning. And when it works, a serviceable first draft is achieved.
Unfortunately, I usually can’t work it out in a shorter form. (The two NaNoWriMos where it worked out were exceptions.) It’s fast, for me, to draft, and it’s easier to work out a scene by writing the scene — or the chapter — or the book. So I often end up with disconnected chunks of the work, sometimes in the wrong order, definitely with the emphasis in the wrong place.
That is my zero draft. The draft that takes a little bit (or maybe a lot!) of work before it’s what I’d consider a “draft” of the novel. I’ve also heard it called a “junk” draft.
By promising myself it’s a zero draft, I know I will never share it with anyone else in that state. That frees me, it gives me permission for it to suck because no one else’s eyes will be on it.
It lets me tell myself the story, once, fumblingly, to feel my way through it. No pressure to even be readable, much less presentable. By the end, I’ll know if I have a story worth the effort of making it readable. If not, into the trunk it goes (to join half a dozen (and counting) other efforts).
But if it’s worth more effort, now I have the raw material to work from. I can either tackle the first draft as a revision, where I patch it up, plug the holes, do a little rewriting to make it into a full story. Or, if it’s a complete mess with a nice kernel, I can take the useful bits, re-outline, and write it all from scratch.
That is what I mean by a zero draft. The craptastic version I have to get out of my system on the way to a polished story worth sharing.
Happy writing!
Exercise: The main character (or a Stock Character) is struggling to draft something (a letter, a treaty, a poem, a novel). What does their process look like? Does it bear any resemblance to yours? Are they stuck at the very beginning, or is it a breeze?
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