First, let’s define some terms. Draft Zero is the very first draft, the one you don’t dare show anyone because even you haven’t read it yet. You don’t know what’s in there. You don’t know if it even tells a complete story yet.
The First Draft comes after you’ve read it and done some cleaning up, like filling in missing scenes and making sure the beginning and end loosely connect. It’s the first complete draft that you might be willing to share.
For the purposes of this post, we’ll be talking about Draft Zero.
You often hear things like ‘your first draft is always going to be terrible!’ Or, ‘your first draft should suck.’
I don’t believe that.
And I don’t just mean that some people are capable of writing “clean” first drafts, meaning they don’t have a ton of typos and errors. Drafting clean is not the same as writing a draft that doesn’t suck.
What I’m talking about is one of the fundamental differences between most Plotters and Pantsers.
It’s very true that, for 99% of us, if you start writing a story without a ton of planning, and wing it through the whole process, chances are your draft will be very, very messy. It will have tangents and threads that go nowhere. Things that were never mentioned in the first half will become vitally important in the second half. This is pantsing (writing by the seat of your pants) and it usually results in drafts that require a lot of work before they’re ready for other people to read them.
Some people prefer this method. Terry Pratchett said,
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
For a lot of people that’s 100% true. The first draft is you working out what the story is, figuring it out as you go. It’s an exploratory process, and if that’s what works for you, you should not put pressure on yourself to turn out a draft that other people would read and admire.
But. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Planning and outlining gets a bad rap for being formulaic, or for taking the excitement of discovery out of the process.
What it actually does is separate and move the discovery phase to earlier in the process than Draft Zero.
(Okay, yes, I wanted an excuse to play with my new pens.)
In the above diagram you can see that pantsers and plotters are doing the same work, just in a different configuration. Crucially, the work on consequences (cause and effect, logical progression, implications for what comes before and after) happens later in the process for pantsers. A lot of plotting work (at least for me) is making sure everything has an important consequence. Or, that every outcome has a solid impetus. It’s a lot of back-and-forth work, that I find impossible to do while drafting.
I’ve talked before about how I can either come up with ideas, problem solve, or write nice prose but I can’t do them all at the same time. So I don’t try to.
Plotting works for me because it enables me to work on one part of the process at a time. I get all the thinking of what’s going to happen next out of the way, then I worry about executing the ideas in prose.
And that’s how I end up with a Draft Zero that doesn’t suck: planning.
It’s true that Draft Zero is the worst state your manuscript will ever be in. It’s your first attempt at prose for it, and it’s going to have some things that need fixing. But the universe does not have a rule that requires your Draft Zero to suck.
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