No, not those bothersome things that come in through the window and kill you with cold air. Nor the board game. Nor being called up by the bothersome army. I mean drafting stories.
Do you draft your stories?
Do you have a rough idea, then do a rough outline, and flesh it out later?
Do you plan in meticulous detail?
Or maybe it just happens without drafting?
Do you put a draft on paper?
An enquiring mind wants to know.
I tend not to draft. I sit and think and then just write, or sometimes I just sit and write, without any clear idea of what I'm going to write about. I've always been a little baffled as to why people draft, but I do understand it on some level. One of my teachers told me to draft a story and I went ahead and just wrote the damned thing. When she asked me why I'd done it, I said that I had an idea and just wrote it down, I don't need to draft. This teacher was as eccentric as me, and we were on the same wavelength, so she understood what I meant, and allowed me to keep going. Most teachers would have told me to stop and plan it, but when faced with a creative brain, you just have to let it go. Anyway, enough rambling from me, I wanna know your thoughts on drafts.
I don't tend to draft my shorter pieces, and I honestly don't call something a draft until it's finished and then I leave it... then it becomes a first draft or second draft or whatever. Like... Tomorrow... technically this is my second draft of it, but meh. I don't draft chapters, or anything, I just WRITE.
HOWEVER, when working with a non-fiction piece such as a research paper or what have you, I do draft. I have to, or it'll come out like crap.
Professionally, I'm all about the outline, format, notes and intellectual soundness. But, I have to admit that it takes less out of me to do it and it is actually what I'm most noted for.
With poetry and fiction, my lack of organization is profound. I have a story or a line of thought pop up in my head (inspiration comes from the craziest of things), and I'm off. I have this picture and I simply explain it out. In my fiction, the characters lead the way. In my poetry, I can't even tell you what happens there. I get consumed and I'm simply somewhere else. I've lost poems and could not rewrite them at the original level to save my life. It's the minute I'm in it that shapes it. It's actually pretty much the same for fiction. When most of my friends who are writers sit back and talk about their creative process, I just shut-up. I know how flaky what I have to say is going to sound. There is no sense in having them think I'm crazy.
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I always build up a 'world environment', very in depth character profiles, a general description of the overall story, and a good outline of plot points to reach my intended ending.
Probably about a third of my writing goes into this process. At that point I put the characters in the situation I have built and let them work their way through it.
Now I just write want the characters do, like I am watching a TV show or movie. It goes very quickly.
I find that working everything out ahead of time helps me to 'see' the complete story. It makes it very easy to make changes in any part of the story and then making sure how that change affects everything else.
You can't get there from here, because when you get there you're still here and here is now there. I tried drafting for a novel I was really excited about doing, (phantom wars, which is up on here now) and summarized about 10 pages worth of the plot, the characters that would come in, the setting, how it would all work out in the end. And once I sat down to start writing that book, I basically took those pages and threw them out the window. Even though I knew where to start the story I didn't know how and I spent a few days just working on the first chapter. Of course as I continued the story I would constantly look back to my summarized draft of the novel, but only took about a paragraphs worth of those pages and put them into the actual story itself.
Anyways I digress, I do have some very narrow drafts of my stories now but outside my mountain of notes I don't do anymore drafting, however I do think it it's healthy for writers to draft a story if they feel the need. This way they may have a better idea of where they want to take the story and see ahead of time, before they get to far into writing out all the details, if that's the right or the best direction for that tale. Naturally you don't have to follow your draft so closely but I recommend that if you want to make one, and do it, then use it as guidelines and not instructions on creating your story.
