hey betts! can you give us any insight into your new drafting process (the one you mentioned on Twitter?) those results have me green with envy
sure! this is going to be a fairly quick run-down because i have to start planning my classes here soon.
(anon is referring to this tweet)
required reading
- shitty first drafts by anne lamott, which is where i modified my process from
- on fear by mary ruefle, which talks about procedure and i may have taken the wrong meaning from the essay but basically, my entire process is about mitigating the fear innate in writers’ block by having a procedure in place to counteract it
tools
- google docs (or some other word processor)
- google calendar (or some other calendar app; i wrote about my scheduling process here)
- toggl (or some other timekeeping app)
- airtable (i’ve also used trello, but i like airtable better. ps big thanks to @electricalice for introducing me to it! it’s a lifesaver)
pre-writing
so first you need an idea. whenever i have an idea, even if there’s 0 chance i’ll end up writing it, i add it to my airtable, plus any notes or details i come up with. i also copy and paste any text convos i have about the fic, like if i headcanon something with a friend. (i used trello for this until recently; it works just fine and is a bit easier to use. airtable also has a kanban function though, along with other formats, so it’s a bit more flexible)
airtable is a project management spreadsheet software. i’m sure there are others out there, but i started fiddling with this one and haven’t looked back. it takes a little while to figure out, and you might have to google some things you want it to do that aren’t terribly intuitive.
my fanfic table, filtered by ideas, looks like this:
(you may have to expand to look at it, also note that the pretty colors are a Pro feature of the app and i’m still on my trial)
the idea here is to have space to store my ideas. let’s say i hang out with a friend and we started talking about fic, and i bring up i have an idea for a endgame coda but i’m not really sure where to take it, so we start headcanoning back and forth, and now i have a few scene ideas. i made my endgame coda card already right after i saw the movie, so all i have to do is open the app and jot down the main points of my headcanoning. now when i go home and start working on it, i can easily pull up our brainstorming session.
narrative outlining
i have never been an outliner or a planner. i’ve always been a pantser. i have a premise and i run with it, and that worked for me for a long time. pantsing has a lot of benefits: your story always surprises you! you can get really immersed! it’s certainly the more whimsical writing process.
but what i found was that i would often write myself into a corner, or lose steam once i realized what should have been a 10k fic was actually going to be 80k and i didn’t like the story enough to sit with it for 80k. i also spent a long time thinking about future scenes and writing them down but losing them later, or forgetting about them.
so i started doing narrative outlines, which are just me going “and then THIS happens” repeatedly and sometimes inputting “and something causes this other thing” until eventually i have the whole story written out. the goal of the narrative outline is pacing. all you have to do is get the major beats down. it doesn’t have to be good. no one is going to see it (unless you want them to).
ideally my paragraphs will be all around the same size. those are going to become my chapters. if a paragraph is significantly shorter than another, it’s likely that i don’t have that beat fleshed out yet. i call chapters “beats” because to me, each one should have its own arc, and end at a high or low point in the story.
in my fanfic airtable, i have a table for chapters. all chapters of all multi-chap wips go here, and i can filter out ones that are complete later.
the beauty of the chapters table is that it can connect to your ideas/wip table and vice versa so everything is kept together. i had 7 paragraphs in my narrative outline so i made 7 rows.
notice i also gave myself a due date. i don’t really like due dates, but i’m trying them on for now and seeing how it goes.
i copy and paste the chapter paragraph as i go into the “summary” field. then, as scene or line ideas come to me, i toss them in the “scenes/lines” field. I was in a car for 8 hours and coming up with scenes all over the place, and i needed somewhere to put them. if i didn’t know where they went, i put them in my idea table instead, and filed them later.
you’re still idea-ing, you’re still outlining, but now it’s time to write.
gauge
i make a folder for the fic and open a doc and label it ch1. then i copy and paste the narrative outline paragraph into the doc and separate it out by scene with an asterisk between each one.
here’s where the timesheet and calendar come in. i have a reminder on my calendar to schedule the following day, and on that schedule i put my writing time. when it’s time to write, i start the toggl clock. at the end of each week, i put in my time in my personal timesheet.
the first chapter or 10% of anything i’m writing tends to take longer than the rest, because i need to get into the story, and choose the voice and tense and tone and things like that. so i take however long i take to make what i call a gauge. in knitting, a gauge is the thing that determines the size of the piece. if you’re knitting a sweater, you knit a little square to make sure the sweater comes out the size you need it to be.
so i write the gauge and it takes however long it takes. sometimes i rewrite it a few times, test out POVs and tenses and description and whatever else. what i like best, what seems the most sustainable, is what i choose. i wrote 3 chapters of a novel in present tense and a childish tone before i decided it needed to be first person reflective and i rewrote the whole thing.
don’t get frustrated with yourself if your gauge doesn’t work. that’s what the gauge is for. you’ll know you’ve chosen the right voice if, by the end of your gauge, you’re really eager to keep writing.
down draft & punch list
so now you’ve got a pretty gauge to follow, and the rest is going to be an absolute mess. the down draft is exactly what it sounds like – you get the idea down. i personally believe you need to tell the story to yourself a few times in order to get good at telling the story, or to know what the story is. you’ve told yourself the story once in outline form, and now you’re just breaking out the scenes a little bit more.
the key to the down draft is not to self-edit. i’m not talking about going back and tweaking typos and shit, that’s fine, whatever. i mean doubting yourself structurally. like, oh shit, you forgot to mention that they took off their clothes and now they’re naked.
here’s where the punch list comes in, which is yet another table. (i’ve also used google tasks for this, because it pops up in a side window. either works!) a punch list is a to do list. instead of fixing things, you put the thing on your punch list and save it for the next draft. a down draft is all about speed and figuring out where all the pieces go. revising during the down draft only slows you down.
the punch list is my solution to the contrived advice “you can fix it later!” to which i always say, “BUT I WON’T REMEMBER TO FIX IT LATER I HAVE TO FIX IT NOW.” as soon as you think of something to fix, put it on the table. it may seem like it’s faster to fix things as you go. it is not. i promise.
this is all my punch list notes for all fics, which i then connect to my other tables/filter as needed. put everything in your punch list. it’s better to make a punch list item that you don’t end up implementing than forget an important revision note. if you end up putting the project down for a while, you’ll want to know what you’d intended.
up draft
in the up draft, you clean up the down draft. here, i take each document in a new window, put it on the right half of the screen, and open a new document to put on the left.
then i rewrite the whole fucking thing. i pull up my punch list and fix all the things as i go, to the best of my ability. here’s where the writing gets pretty and fleshed out. but still, it doesn’t need to be perfect. you have more revisions to go. it’s important to remember during this entire process that everything can be changed. nothing is permanent. you’re not writing in stone. there’s no cost to words or documents, so you can revise as much as you want.
it’s also worth noting that the longer your project, the more sectioned out your story will be. sometimes you’ll have a chapter on a down draft and another chapter on an up draft. sometimes you might down draft out of order just to make sure you get your ideas down when they occur. whatever works for you. the idea is that you’re constantly building spaces in which to put your stuff that can be easily found and implemented. the creative process is messy, so you need to make clean spaces to put the mess in.
while you’re up-drafting, you’re still idea-ing and outlining and down-drafting and punch-listing. maybe you don’t have the answer to a problem yet, but you might later. decision fatigue in the creative process is real. this process is designed to mitigate decision fatigue. there are only ever so many decisions to make at once when you expand out your process like this one.
and sometimes, sadly, the solution to a problem never happen. that’s okay. what you write might be flawed. in fact it should be flawed. flaws are what make things beautiful. all you can do is the best you can do, and if it’s not good enough for your tastes, you can learn from your mistakes and try again.
beta
sometimes i have a beta and sometimes i don’t, depending on how confident i am about the work. when i have a beta, this is the stage i send them my stuff. sometimes i tell them specific things i’m looking for, like just line edits, or cheerleading, or whatever else. sometimes i have questions about whether or not something is working. i tell them what date i intend to post and when i would like edits to be done by, and if they don’t get around to it, that’s okay. i can just hustle a little harder in the next revision.
dental draft
here’s where, per anne lamott, you check every tooth. i implement my remaining punch list items and beta feedback, fix pacing issues, typos, unclear sentences, etc. sometimes i do the side-by-side window thing for chapters that are particularly messy, and sometimes i just fix the existing doc. by now your story should be looking pretty good, or the best you can get it.
final read-through :) or additional revisions :(
for fic, this is the point where i hit it and hope. i copy and paste the chapter/fic into an ao3 shell with the tags and summary i’ve kept in my airtable, and do a final readthrough. i don’t do it in the original doc because seeing it in a new font and format usually makes me notice things i’d missed before.
for ofic, here’s where you might need more feedback and more revising if your piece isn’t working yet, or if you’ve submitted it a couple dozen places and haven’t had it accepted. while this process is thorough, sometimes pieces still aren’t working for whatever reason. don’t throw anything away, though. keep it, file it, log it in your airtable, and maybe one day while you’re driving an idea will pop into your head and you’ll be able to come back to it.
this was a really really quick run-down of an extremely long and complicated process, but it works for me! i probably wouldn’t have been able to do this even a year ago. it’s taken me a long time to cultivate this kind of discipline, and i’m still a work in progress. so if it’s too much or too structured for you, that’s fine. maybe you can take one or two things for yourself and try them out.