Drafting, Revising, Editing

I don't think you can define the writing process. It is not a clinical thing, but something that is concieved, gestates and then after a long, painful labor, is born.

For me- I have to have a great character in mind first, the plot comes later-I write as I go and only when the end is in place do I go back and edit.

I know this is very different for everyone, but that is how it works for me.

For me, there is no pre-writing. There's writing first draft, writing second draft, line editing and beta reading for third draft.



(then submitting to agents)

For me once the writing starts everything starts and revision is continuous. I find that the farther I write, the more things in the earlier parts become clear, so I work at whatever aspect strikes my fancy at the moment. When I get to the end, the revision and editing keep going until...

Breaking things down into twinky pigeonhole bits is a nice game for some people, but writing takes place in real life - and no two lives are alike.

I agree with Matera. I have a good idea of the whole story but have to revise continually. At some stage in the writing the characters start to carry the story themselves and sometimes I find myself going along a path I hadn't planned. So I have to re-evaluate the lot. You see, I usually know all the main characters before I start the story. So I write a half-page biography of them - their upbringing, schooling, early experiances, loves, successes and failures. Even if most of these things are never mentioned in the book, they help me keep the character in character, if you see what I mean.

When I'm in the early stages of writing, my editing is very general but toward the end I'm evaluating every word. That's because I like to get the story on paper and I don't spend a lot of time, initially, on fine detail in battle scenes, jousting, the injustice in medieval courts etc. I get the facts down in quite a bit of detail, but I return to fine-tune the fear, terror and/or distress. It takes a while. I've read original writings from that time and use the internet constantly for names of pieces of armour - I'm even making my own haubergeon.

So writing to me is a really hands-on thing and can't be cut up into nicely labelled processes.

Lisa F said:

I'd like to know how prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing fit into your personal writing process. Where do these pieces fit with developing characters, creating plots, and delving into craft?

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That's a difficult question. I don't do any prewriting but I do a lot of prethinking. I write historical fiction so as I do my research I also develop my plot and characters, still all in my head.
After I feel I'm ready I begin my first draft. Each day I reread the previous day's work and make any revisions before continuing on. I do this all the way through. My plot is loose and I generally give my characters their head, with only a gentle nudge in the direction of my planned ending. After the first draft I set the manuscript aside for several months then go back with a hard copy and a red pen, correct spelling, punctuation (although my editor deletes most of my commas. I use too many) grammar, sentence structure plus do further revisions if necessary.
Although I know who my characters are, their development is not planned but evolves from the story. Sometimes I don't know how they'll react until I put them in a given situation. Sometimes minor characters develop larger roles. To be perfectly honest I don't think too much about craft. It's been my experience that most writers become more skillful the more they write so I just plug away.

Prewriting is done in my head. I concieve the story, most of the main characters, main events and plot points, the goal of the story, what they are all aiming at, backgrounds and so forth. Prewriting actually goes on through most of the drafting stage in my method of writing.

The drafting is the actual writing, in my sig you can see that part growing if you keep watching it every day or two. (Sometimes I forget to update it.)

The revision process is where I smooth out the storyline, it can mingle with the drafting stage if I come across some pretty big changes. This is the stage where I make most of my changes, and it doesn't mean one swipe through, sometimes it takes several swipes.

The editing process is where I look at typos and so forth.

The publishing stage, I'm still working on that. Took a way wrong turn when I was 19 and ended up in the nightmarish land of PA. It's taken me this long to fully recover but I'm confident I've pulled myself together efficiently enough to make a real go of it again. (This time no wrong turns!)

If only it was nice and neat like that!

One of the difficulties I always had in my writing classes was producing different drafts of a piece. I edit in the process of writing, and once I've finished a sizable chunk of writing (say, a chapter or so) I edit the whole thing. Then, three or four days later, I edit it again. But the constant changes and revisions are very little things, such as rephrasing a single sentence, and it always seemed wasteful to me to print out the entire piece based on that tiny fix.

My stepfather is a professor of educational psychology and he writes books about how to raise children in the Lord (yeah, right, behold his success *eyeroll*). He tells me that he often writes only one sentence or paragraph in a session, and spends the entire session constantly revising that small bit of writing until he's satisfied with it. Quite often he'll spend hours on ten words. I'm not nearly that ponderous, but I have some sympathy for the arduousness of the process.

Defining each 'stage' of the writing process has SOME merit in that it shows you what is necessary for an idea to become a viable manuscript, but it's still a gross oversimplification. Yes, you need to pre-write, but pre-writing can occur entirely in your head. I had a hell of a time with those brainstorming bubbles they made you draw out on paper because the whole thing seemed unnatural to me. Yes, you need to edit, but the editing process is manifold and complex - you edit, you re-edit, you have a beta-reader edit, then you edit the beta-reader's edit. Revision is somewhere in there, but I've never been terribly clear on the difference between revision and editing. Mea culpa. And drafting, to me, is just the act of writing the words out for the first time - if you go back and revise them immediately, the act of drafting is such a minuscule part of the total process it almost doesn't need its own term unless you're a NaNoWriMo method writer, and you don't edit ANYTHING until the story is written out completely.

I'm way too much of a perfectionist to do that. It would (and will, this November) drive me nuts.

Lisa F;

I can only speak for myself here. For my novel, I got a little head spark and sat down and started typing. That became chapters after a while. At 9, 000 words I thought it was done. At 19,000 I was sure it was a book. That blossomed to over 100,000. As I went, I'd see plot holes or find another thread to follow. All this to say, I edited as I wrote- like ripples through the process.

Once I felt it was done, I read it straight through. I saw things (some whole chapters) that needed to go. The process was 7 months. I let it lie for at least that long and now I'm going through what I see as a real first edit.

I can see a sort of order, but it's very loosely ordered.

I never plot or preplan anything out. I've tried to before, but never went anywhere with those attempts. Instead, I just start with an idea and/or a couple of character ideas, and I just start writing. The plot, situations and story all unfold as I write. I never know the ending until I get to the end, if that makes any sense. Non of my fiction writing is ever really planned.

For me, the writing process is different now than it was when I was younger though. When I was a teenager, I would write some or most of the first draft, and then go back and rewrite it all to make it better. (All long-hand back then ofcourse). Now that I'm in my 30's, I find that I write big chunks, and then go back and edit and fine tune it until I'm happy with it before I go on. Doing this seems to add to my plot, and makes things unfold for me in later chapters that wouldn't have been there if I hadn't edited the previous chapters.


I love these lyrics to that Natasha Bedingfield song:

"Unwritten"

I am unwritten,
Can't read my mind,
I'm undefined.
I'm just beginning,
Pen's in my hand,
Ending unplanned.

(Chorus
Staring at the blank page before you,
Open up the dirty window,
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find.
Reaching for something in the distance,
So close you can almost taste it,
Release your inhibitions.
And feel the rain on your skin.
No one else can feel it for you,
Only you can let it in.
No one else, no one else can speak the words on your lips.
Drench yourself in words unspoken,
Live your life with arms wide open.
TODAY is where your book begins,
The rest is still unwritten.

I break tradition,
Sometimes my tries are outside the lines.
We've been conditioned to not make mistakes,
I can't live that way!

(Repeat chorus)

Yes! Whatever works. Some folks are the outline and plow through types, some of us do a section then go back and read the whole shebang to see if anything needs fixing to mesh with the last bit, then there's all sorts of betwixt and betweeners. No magic formula, no straight and narrow, just whatever works for you on whatever project you're on.

I tend to agree with those above who said the prewriting is done in thier head. By the time I sit down to actually write something new I already have a pretty good idea in my head of where I am going. Editing is down sometimes as I write, but mostly after the first draft is completed.

Prewriting is whatever leads up to starting something. It may be a conversation, reading a book or news article, a previous piece of writing I've done, especially journaling. I say teach students to be aware of their internal running commentary, and call all of it prewriting, including that part where they jot down a word and random-associate around it.

For me, it goes like this:

1. Get an idea that's usually very small. I let it develop for however long (could be weeks or months) until it's big enough to use as a story.

2. Outline some plot points, flesh out characters.

3. Write first draft.

4. Leave it about a month, then read through and make note of cock ups and things I want to change.

5. Rewrite from scratch.

6. Edit.

7. Last read through and tidy.

8. Give to girlfriend, then make her recommended changes.

9. Send to agents.

10. Get rejection letter.

11. Repeat steps 9 and 10 for the rest of my life.

It's difficult to analyze the writing process because it's different for each writer. At it's barest bones, it's write, edit, submit. Some writers outline and do extensive research (hence the pre-write). Some writers "vomit" out their first draft and need to do both a substantive edit and rewrite and another edit. Some edit as they go and skip the rewrite stage. But nothing gets written or published without those most basic three steps: write, edit, submit. (Wait.)

I teach my students the basic steps -- generating ideas, drafting, etc... but I explain that it is often not a simple, linear journey. Granted, for writing academic essays, following these prescribed steps usually ends with a clear, logical paper. I believe that the process is very different for each person, but that starting with these steps and then molding them to fit one's personality, etc., is key. As I tell my students, you can't break the 'rules' if you don't know them first.

As a creative writer, I follow these steps rather closely. I generate ideas by brainstorming lists and drawing diagrams, then I draft the 'parts', etc... Of course, it's a recursive process, but to put it simply, it just works for me.

Lisa F said:

Would anyone care to share how they would feel if they were expected to stuff their ideas into a graphic organizer before writing, write a first draft all the way through, and then go back and revise, and finally edit? Has anyone here been in a writing class that followed these procedures?

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If I understand what you mean by "graphic organizer", I think I would flip burgers for a living before I'd use such a thing. Traditional outlines are as graphical as I would ever want to get.

Of course, I'm a non-fiction writer, and my single (abortive) attempt at fiction writing went like this:

1. Daydream an interesting plot.

2. Let daydreams continue in my head, with snippets of scenes, characters, background, some dialogue.

3. Develop outline as part of general notes, begin arguing with myself in print with different ideas about setting, background, plot, character relationships, etc.

4. Set outline aside while working on more immediately lucrative projects.

5. Revisit outline and notes days later, stare in slack-jawed self-loathing at my incompetence in managing the requirements of fiction.

6. Drag outline to Recycle Bin, go back to racking up billable writing time.

This is exactly my process!

1. Prewriting: basic ideas pop in head, I sketch out a basic outline and character sheets on the main characters, plus I do worldbuilding (this is ongoing), and background.
2. Drafting: first draft (little to no revising). This also includes "prewriting" as I will go over many scenes in my head in the car before I write them and continue with worldbuilding, plotting and characterization.
3. Revisions: adding in all the things I left out in the draft (from a list I keep), adding layers, i.e. sensory discription, filling in plot holes, characterization, etc. Cutting and moving around scenes.
4. Edits: after usually 2-3 rounds of revisions, I'm ready to edit. This is where I fix sentence structure, repetitive words, punctuation and grammer, deleting extraneous stuff. This can go anywhere from 5-10 passes thru the MS.

Lisa F said:

Would anyone care to share how they would feel if they were expected to stuff their ideas into a graphic organizer before writing, write a first draft all the way through, and then go back and revise, and finally edit? Has anyone here been in a writing class that followed these procedures?

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Honestly? I'd hate it. I've never been to a writing class that operated that way. We wrote on the spot, either with an idea presented by the person teaching the class - published writer, acting coach, editor etc.- or after some sort of exercise intended to stimulate ideas. Different elements of writing - characterization, dialogue, scene setting etc.- were taught, then practiced in class, then shared aloud. In free writing time we could either continue with our WIP or begin something new. At intervals our work would be critiqued by the facilitator and/or our peers. Others will probably have different experiences but those are the sorts of classes I attended and found beneficial.
Linnea

I'd hate it, too. Especially if I were expected to stick with the outline.

I mostly do a tiny bit of prewriting in my head, and then I start typing. Then, I'll reach an impasse, and I'll have to brainstorm some and roll the idea around a little while. Then I type some more. Then, I revise what I've got. Then I type some more.

Those are the unfinished novels.

With shorts, I start with an idea. I type it out, all the way through. Then, I do a second draft, then a final revision/polish.

For the novella I'm on at the moment, I wrote the first draft in November (NaNo). Last night, I printed the whole danged thing out, and I've started doing some edits. Then, when that's finished, I'll do a rewrite based on those. When that's done, I'll print again and edit. Then, I'll try to find a beta reader (or ten, LOL). After that, it's a final polish, and then submission.

I can't imagine having to stick to a rigid outline. I've done one that was pretty much a scene by scene synopsis, and that seemed to work pretty well. Only reason I've stopped writing that particular novel was because I was so turned off by my antagonist. I'm going to let that idea simmer for awhile, then I may take another crack at it.

Lisa F said:

A number of years ago some educators defined the writing process as: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

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I don't prewrite. I have a pretty well-insulated house, so there are no drafts.

I write. Then I revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. (I've never thought of revising and editing as separate processes.) Then I get sick of looking at it and submit to an agent. Submit. Submit. Submit.

Haven't reached publishing yet.

Lisa F said:

Would anyone care to share how they would feel if they were expected to stuff their ideas into a graphic organizer before writing, write a first draft all the way through, and then go back and revise, and finally edit? Has anyone here been in a writing class that followed these procedures?

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Not sure what you mean by graphic organizer so I can't really answer that one.

As for writing classes every single one of my writing classes required:

Outline, bubble graph, or some other such tool which I absolutely hated.
Rough draft - it's obvious what that one is.
First draft - as in first edited.
Second draft - again obvious.
Final Draft - the copy you handed in.

I hated, HATED, HATED this. I didn't have separate drafts I would change things as I went along. I had to make artificial drafts or face a lower grade simply because I didn't have those extra papers. I was constantly getting "Not Developed Enough" because I didn't have four and five copies to show even though one of my papers made the sample pile of how to write a paper in college.

It kept me from doing any kind of outlining and bubble thought drafts from any of my creative writing. I honestly think it has hurt my writing because I despise it so much. Instead of cramming it down students throats they should teach you various tools then let you pick it and judge your final paper on just that, your final paper.

Okay I'm done.


To this day I still despise those tools. Though I've found other ways to outline via paragraph synopsis type form when I need to.

prewriting, to me anyway, is research. I already have the idea, and the characters. prewriting (reasearch) leads me to a point where I want to begin the story.

LaceWing said:

Prewriting is whatever leads up to starting something. It may be a conversation, reading a book or news article, a previous piece of writing I've done, especially journaling. I say teach students to be aware of their internal running commentary, and call all of it prewriting, including that part where they jot down a word and random-associate around it.

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I don't do any conscious prewriting at all and the idea of being aware of what I'm thinking about rather fills me with horror. I like to start with a blank screen and an empty head - still, whatever works for you.