magistrate (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
magistrate) wrote2014-01-13 12:58 am
magistrate) wrote2014-01-13 12:58 am
Entry tags:
Thinking about drafts and revisions
One of the metrics I track in my little home-brewed submissions tracker is what draft a story is on when I submit it. It's been occasionally useful – noting when I do revision requests, for example – but recently, I've noticed that almost everything I've been submitting (and selling) is on its first draft. Which I think bears some investigation, because it ends up saying a lot more about how I conceptualize "drafts" than it does about my first-pass writing.
I've mentioned before that I tend to write nonlinearly – a scrap here, a bit there, whole scenes interspersed with fragments of sentences as I come up with bits that stick in my head or in-scene ways to jot down what's happening. Here, I'll grab a representative sample of a story in progress:
The >s indicate places where something is missing. That "something" may be two or three words, two or three paragraphs, or – in single-document works – entire scenes or chapters. I'll have bits from the very beginning and bits from the very end, with a certain increase in density around the juicy bits, but often not a lower frequency of > markers.
This means that as I'm writing, I'm constantly going back and forth like the shuttle on a loom. I'm constantly re-reading the written bits so that I can re-orient myself and add more on to the scenes. As I'm re-reading, I'm also wincing at the awkward bits and poking and prodding them to make them more presentable.
The other fringe benefit of this style of writing is that if I add something in at the end, the beginning is often still so unformed that I can go back and seed it with foreshadowing without disrupting the pacing or anything. If I decide to bring out another theme, I can shuttle back and forth and add in the supports it needs. I'm revising as I'm writing, and each section gets several passes – but not in a way where it's easy to tally them up and see how much revision I've put any one section through, let alone the entire work.
Which is not, to my mind, how drafting works. As I grok it, a draft produces a complete story at the end: possibly not an ideal story, or a functional one, but a complete one. One you can read through from beginning to end. And while I do sometimes do revisions after the first draft – ones where I split open the ribs of the story and muck with things and suture it back together into another complete draft again – it's not my primary mode of revising.
Which leads to an interesting question: is there a metric that would be more useful to track, if I don't make a lot of use of drafting? What are other ways to judge how much work went into a piece? Time spent on it seems tempting, but given that I tend to jump around from project to project and spend variable amounts of time each day even on the stuff I do focus on every day, it also seems like an accurate sense of that would require more active tracking than I want to invest.
I've mentioned before that I tend to write nonlinearly – a scrap here, a bit there, whole scenes interspersed with fragments of sentences as I come up with bits that stick in my head or in-scene ways to jot down what's happening. Here, I'll grab a representative sample of a story in progress:
>
the thunk-kah of a second car being latched to the back of the first.
>
You don't want to go back there, Ausar said.
She paused on the threshold, with her hand on the door. "Are you saying I shouldn't?"
No, Ausar said. But you certainly don't want to.
>
He was wrong, though. She did want to. It pulled at her, like the curiosity of an unopened but beautiful box.
>
The next car was dark. The paneling was black, and the carpet, and the cushions on the benches. The benches were wrought-iron. Even the chandelier was more like a shadow in which a multitude of small flames flickered. She stepped through the doorway, and the chill to the air hit her like a wall.
AMELIA–!
The >s indicate places where something is missing. That "something" may be two or three words, two or three paragraphs, or – in single-document works – entire scenes or chapters. I'll have bits from the very beginning and bits from the very end, with a certain increase in density around the juicy bits, but often not a lower frequency of > markers.
This means that as I'm writing, I'm constantly going back and forth like the shuttle on a loom. I'm constantly re-reading the written bits so that I can re-orient myself and add more on to the scenes. As I'm re-reading, I'm also wincing at the awkward bits and poking and prodding them to make them more presentable.
The other fringe benefit of this style of writing is that if I add something in at the end, the beginning is often still so unformed that I can go back and seed it with foreshadowing without disrupting the pacing or anything. If I decide to bring out another theme, I can shuttle back and forth and add in the supports it needs. I'm revising as I'm writing, and each section gets several passes – but not in a way where it's easy to tally them up and see how much revision I've put any one section through, let alone the entire work.
Which is not, to my mind, how drafting works. As I grok it, a draft produces a complete story at the end: possibly not an ideal story, or a functional one, but a complete one. One you can read through from beginning to end. And while I do sometimes do revisions after the first draft – ones where I split open the ribs of the story and muck with things and suture it back together into another complete draft again – it's not my primary mode of revising.
Which leads to an interesting question: is there a metric that would be more useful to track, if I don't make a lot of use of drafting? What are other ways to judge how much work went into a piece? Time spent on it seems tempting, but given that I tend to jump around from project to project and spend variable amounts of time each day even on the stuff I do focus on every day, it also seems like an accurate sense of that would require more active tracking than I want to invest.