Look I admit, I’m wrong, and I can be kind of a pain in the backside about things.
My problem is that I understand by deconstructing. I need to know what’s right and wrong with something, to understand the compromises it makes, in order to get a handle on it.
In the case of the term “draft” I think the problem is that it has three meanings:
- The act of copying a work.
- The physical copy resulting from that act.
- The thought and procedure that goes into making a new version of a work.
When an author sets out to create a “first draft”, those three meanings are essentially the same. The author has a thought, copies it down, and creates a physical thing.
Until computers came on the scene, and correct me if I’m wrong, I’d guess that the procedure for creating each new draft necessitated recopying a work, not just the parts that changed, but everything had to be rewritten.
So a lot of planning went into creating each draft. If the writer misspelled “utter” and wanted to change “Steve” to “Sam”. They would pore through the text, make a lot of notes, and then sit down for the better part of a week and retype the darn thing.
On a computer, writing is incremental. As soon as you enter in any change, no matter how small, the computer does definition 1 to create definition 2 automatically. And so I find those definitions not to be helpful after the first draft.
When I work on a piece I reread it, making changes as I go, until I have a copy I’m okay with other people reading.
So it was very confusing to hear people talk about second and third drafts until I understood that they were using notes on paper copies to save up revisions to make in a single pass. A revelation that only came to me when Neandermagnon talked about handwriting novels.
I’ve done beta swaps, written notes for other people, and used their notes when revising my work, but when it comes to revising my own work, I’ll just go in and make the changes without making notes about it first.
So yes, “drafts” are an important tool. But the definition, at least to me, remains confounding. If I make a hundred incremental changes to a computer file, am I still on draft one? Or am I on draft one hundred?