Drafting. It’s the epitome of writing, the thing we all imagine when we picture writers working away at the typewriter. At its best, all of the writer’s knowledge comes together into an experience resembling a flow sport. At its worst, the words plop out one at a time, agonizingly slow, with all the beauty and originality of a can of chunky beef soup.
Every writer drafts differently, from the quality of content they produce, to the time they spend drafting vs planning vs editing, to the amount of words they draft in a session, to the amount of time each drafting session runs. Perhaps because of this individuality of process, little is written about how to draft. And rarely are writers told to examine their drafting habits and maintain a drafting strategy.
Like so many other parts of writing, we pick it up as we go, spending years figuring out that we draft best at the full moon while balanced on the roof with a perfectly brewed cup of roast chicory on hand and a black and white kitten in lap. We get to the point where we have to send precisely five emails, scroll for seven yards down Facebook, and tweet the contents of our breakfast before we can begin. Or, beaten into submission by our daily lives, we learn to draft anywhere, any time, tracing a few precious sentences with fingers on the toddler’s back as we dress them for the day.
If someone had told me before I drafted my first book, “try some different strategies for drafting and then pick the one that works best for you” I probably would have thought they were crazy. How can you strategize something as loose and creative as drafting?
Well, nearly twenty years and many, many drafts later, I have learned that you can strategize just about anything. In order to prove it, I’ve put together a brief quiz that will reveal your ideal drafting strategy. Before we get to the quiz, let me summarize two distinct approaches to drafting: intensively vs intermittently.
Intensive drafting means you’re focusing all your writing time on drafting a manuscript at once. Nanowrimo is an extreme version of this, but it could happen at any time of the year–during school break, paid leave, a weekend retreat, etc. It can also happen throughout the year, if, say, you dedicate an hour a day to drafting and nothing else, on top of your busy schedule. it just means that you are focusing your writing attention intensively on drafting one manuscript. Planning and revising occur before and after drafting, but not during.
Intermittent drafting means that during your writing time, you’re splitting your focus between drafting, planning, and revising concurrently. (By planning and plan in this post I mean any kind of shorthand for your novel; an outline, summary, scene list, plot graph, etc.) For example, you might write out a plan, then draft a scene in that plan, then return to the plan and make changes, then return to the scene and do some revising.
My guess, and my personal experience, is that most writers probably do a little of both of these methods. I like to draft intensively when I have the chance, but when I am only writing once or twice a week, intermittent drafting helps me keep track of my story.
The advantage of intensive drafting is that you can keep the big picture in your mind more easily; the disadvantage is that you tend to skip over a lot of details, and if you veer from your plan, it’s hard to reconcile the plan to the draft at the end of the process. Intensive drafting can end up leading to a lot of revising on all levels.
Intermittent drafting has the advantage of keeping you on track with your plan, and at the end, your plan and your draft will probably match if you’ve been keeping them synchronized. It also has the advantage of being able to make changes as you go, so that if you veer from the plan, you can make adjustments down the line without getting lost.
The big disadvantage to intermittent drafting is that it takes a lot longer, and it can be easy to lose interest in the ideas encapsulated in your draft. If it takes two years to draft a book, the themes that drew your attention two years ago might not matter as much now. It can also be easy to get lost in constant tinkering and never declare the draft done. And even though you might produce a much cleaner draft than you did with intensive drafting, you might still need to do a lot of structural editing, especially if you’ve altered the plan over and over as you went.
With both intermittent and intensive drafting, there are an almost endless combination of planning and revision strategies. Some people might be best off drafting intensively with no planning aforehand; others might prefer to plan out every little detail ahead of time, then draft intermittently. Some might want to revise at every scene, others might want to wait and revise everything at the end.
The quiz below will help reveal where you lie on this spectrum of strategizing.
Quiz: Give yourself a point for each number you choose as your answer to the question (eg. “4. I write one or twice a week”=4 points.)
A. How would you describe your relationship to planning?
- I don’t like to plan at all
- I like to plan before I draft, but the plan doesn’t change as I draft
- I like to plan and revise the plan as I go
- When I do plan, I put together a plan after I draft
B. Do you prefer to put your time into drafting or into revision?
- I’d rather draft fast and then spend most of my time revising
- I want to spend most of my time planning, then draft fast, then revise as needed
- I’d rather plan, draft and revise in tandem until I produce a very complete draft
- I’d rather have the most complete draft possible, no matter how long it takes, with no revision at the end.
C. What is your strength in writing?
- Prose (description, dialog, action, interior thoughts and feelings) comes easily for me
- I have a hard time holding the structure of my story in my head. Writing scenes is easier.
- It’s easy for me to structure my story as I write, but writing prose is difficult
- I don’t usually need an outline to keep track of what’s going on in the story as I write
D. What do you want to produce at the end of your drafting process?
- If I have the shape of a story, I’ll be happy. Everything else can happen in revision.
- I want to write out the plot and character arcs thoroughly, and revision will mostly be line editing.
- I want to have a draft that matches my plan, with most of the scenes perfect and little revision needed.
- I already know my story, drafting to me means illustrating it with prose and end up with a near-perfect draft.
1. 4-6 points: DRANTSER You work best as an intensive drafter, but you also dislike planning. You’ll spend most of your time revising as you draft quickly and find the shape of your story as you go. Tips: Don’t waste any time revising while you draft, because the shape of your story will be different by the time you finish. Use drafting intensively to find your story and then move on. If you can stand it, come up with a plan after you draft.
2. 7-9 points: PLAFTER You like to plan and will work best as an intensive drafter. You will spend a while coming up with a plan, then draft intensively. Tips: Don’t freak out when your draft deviates from your plan. Just calmly revise your plan after you’ve finished drafting. And don’t be overwhelmed by the amount of revision you have to do. Trust me, it’s less revision than the Drantser will be doing!
3. 10-12 points PLINTER You are a planner who works best with intermittent drafting. You will plan before, during, and after drafting. You like to have a plan that matches the draft at all times. Tips: Make the plan conform to the story, not the other way around. Keep the process flexible enough to accommodate changes that will make the story better, but put a limit on the process. You might work best with a deadline, otherwise you will be tempted to tinker forever.
4. 13-16 points INTERMANSTER: You will get the best results with intermittent drafting, but prefer little to no planning. You carry the story in your head pretty well, and when you spend time revising between drafting, you refresh your memory of it. Your focus in drafting will be on prose, not the story. Tips: Revise forward as much as possible. That is, don’t spend a lot of time going back and revising the first chapters. Write a scene, revise it, write the next scene, revise that, keep leapfrogging forward. Wait until you get to the end to go back and revise the beginning.
What kind of drafter are you? Or do none of these labels fit? Do you use a different strategy altogether? Do you combine elements of several of these?
Coming up next: 101 TIWIK #54: Strategies for Drafting: Productivity During Drafting
