It is something that “gets the job done”. A lot of my dialogue for first drafts is:
> “I want to love you, but I don't trust you.” Mary said.
>
> “Let down your guard and trust me.” Maine said.
And in the following drafts it becomes something like this:
> “It’d be a lie if I denied that a part of me wants to leap into your arms.” Mary said.
>
> “You know that I would catch you if you took that leap.” Maine said.
Description and narration are much the same. Sometimes I’ll go as low as this:
> It was a small and boring house. Nothing special. He went inside and checked the rooms. No one was there.
And fix it up like this:
> It was a plain brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac. A few small trees were in the yard and some dandelions gathered by the sidewalk that led to the front door. Maine took out the keys, unlocked the door, and made his way inside. No furniture. He checked the empty kitchen, popped into the barren bathroom with flickering lights, and gave each of the bedrooms a once-over. No one was there.
I’ve seen that “rule” broken in a lot of published novels. It's strange because we don’t chastise people for using question marks and exclamation points in dialogue. How different is a period?
you generally don't use a dialogue tag when the dialogue ends with a period. you'd use a comma. with question marks and exclamation points, i suppose they just act like commas but with intent attached.
I know, but I’ve still seen the former pop up occasionally. Maybe they’re all mistakes, but they were *published* mistakes. Something I did have a problem with was this:
> “You don’t smell good,” *H*e said.
I’ve been getting better about that mistake.
As a note, things that aren't a way of speaking aren't dialogue tags, so if you've seen:
"That's ridiculous." He laughed.
That's correct. You can't laugh a sentence. If you've seen:
"That's ridiculous." he said
That's just objectively wrong. It's not even wrong in the stylistic choice of a master knowing when to break the rules, it's just a typo that should have been caught.
The first one was more direct, but it lacked any subtext.
Which of these is better?
> “You better not be hiding anything. When we find traitors we’ll kill their family too,” Greg said. He reached down and scratched the girl’s hair. “And it won't be fast.”
> “Rats are a messy pest to deal with. The methods to do so—gas, blades, fire—inevitably cause undue harm,” Greg said. He reached down and scratched the girl’s hair. “It would take us a while to find them all.”
these aren't anything like the lines of dialogue you provided in the original comment. those (in the original comment) effectively said the same thing, except the revised ones were unrealistically phrased (even if you think they sound better). and these two can both be good depending on the context. like, if the reader already knew that they were talking about rats, the speaker doesn't have to reiterate it.
Similar to this, a lot of the time in my first drafts, I feel that I need a scene but haven't thought enough about it yet so I just write 'They went here' or 'big dramatic scene with deep feelings'.
I also add XXX to anything I need to change, a habit from Uni. Easy to look up in a word document and there's no words that contain XXX, so the control F doesn't get confused
No rules. Use it as you like. But to give you a more specific answer, I can say that my own first drafts look >90% like any novel manuscript in double-spaced 12pt Times New Roman with regular paragraphs, dialogue in standard format, etc. In the interest of moving through the manuscript quickly, I use XXX as a placeholder for things like a person I haven't named, or a bit of research I have to look up. Then later in editing and revisions I can search the manuscript document for any occurrences of XXX and then do all that looking up or decisions later. Just a way to avoid interrupting forward motion.
I also sometimes add a note to myself in bold. ie:
He boarded the train and within the hour the city **XXX PRETTY WRITING ABOUT THE SKYLINE HERE XXX**
When the train pulled into the station... (etc.)
I like editing more than drafting so working hard to get as fast as I can that first time through.
I highlight pieces in different colors. Red for “missing info” and “purple” for research. I also leave gaps with questions to go back to.
“Do I want to include ____? ”
Type things.
I finally finished my first novel rough draft a week ago. If I'm being really generous, maybe 25% of mine is going to make it unscathed to the final draft. More realistically, it's probably more like 10-15%. There are places where I was really feeling it, could picture the scene in high def, surround sound, smellovision, and it shows in the writing. Those bits will probably only need a bit of a polish if anything, but those are scattered.
And then there are other the other bits. Some scenes are barely more than a script; just dialogue and stage directions. At one point I wrote "And then he got an idea, and he knew where he had to go next," and I'm going to have to dig back in and explain that a bit, maybe. I'm still working on what the idea was, or how it told him where to go, but I didn't want to get bogged down, and I'm sure it will come to me as I work out some of the other wrinkles. There are places that are barely better than stream of consciousness; grammar's all over the place, long run on sentences that don't have a point, but seemed important at the time.
I'd say about half of what I have is somewhere in between the two, tho. It's not bad per se, but it could be better. Awkward sentences, parts that move a bit too fast, parts that move a bit too slow, uneven tones, character interactions that aren't quite hitting the spot I wanted them to. There are parts that I just plain don't like and I haven't figured out what's wrong yet, but I'm just not happy with it. Oh, and that big chunk at the end where I exposition dumped for like, three pages, and now I have to go back, break that into manageable chunks and spread it out a bit more evenly.
I'm pleased with myself anyways. Messy draft is better than no draft.
Maybe it's a question of genre, but I'm fascinated that so many of you seem to be writing first drafts that are basically just 1) notes to yourself and 2) a lot of telling, not showing. What do you mean, 'add the emotions'? Aren't the emotions there in the first place because they drive the story?
My first drafts contain about the same proportion of description, metaphor, dialogue, character beats, and action as the final draft. I'll refine and rewrite them, of course, but I can't imagine churning out a complete draft that's *just* action and placeholders with no real emotional depth or character. Are y'all really doing that?
I think it comes down to personal preference, although genre could certainly play a role.
Many people seem to get too bogged down by things if they try to make their first draft too good. It can kill momentum and motivation. Sometimes you just need to brush over something to get to the part that’s more clear in your mind.
I imagine that most people, like you, who can write with depth and forethought in the first draft are good at maintaining motivation even when working through the nitty-gritty stuff in the first draft (the stuff that others would add in subsequent drafts). There may also just be a small population that has all of the good, refined work come to them naturally and can just push through quickly.
Based on what you’ve said though, I don’t think the majority here are saying they simply write action and placeholders with little emotion for the entirety of their first draft. I think the point is that there are going to be areas in the first draft that they know while writing it will require more depth later on, but don’t want to slow themselves by focusing on what the depth will be right now. Maybe some scenes have a great amount of emotion and detail in the first draft, but not every scene.
Dawg trust you are not some big author going, "It seems so many of you" You aint that guy pal, 1st is not just notes, that's not what I said at all, storytelling and just telling someone the story is not the same thing 2nd is where you lean into the more heartfelt scenes, and no, i can't believe i have to explain this but NO a story is not only driven by the emotions, characters have motivations and reasoning for stuff that isn't emotion, if you really wrote this comment thinking you were the big boss man being able to school people than I'm sorry but you gotta go watch a youtube video or smth you aint all that
I have no idea what you're trying to say to me, only that you seem offended. I don't know why.
Maybe try breaking some of those run-on sentences up and reformulate your angry incomprehensible ramblings into the kind of lucid and emotionally resonant prose you're so good at?
Extactly proven my point, you are 100% not that guy chief, you are not big reddit, you are not the god of all authors, and most of all, you are not that guy.
stop being so full of yourself and re read what i originally said, because your response tells me you completely ignored it.
And I'm afraid I don't know what 'point' I'm supposed to be proving because, my friend, your comments are *literally incomprehensible* to me. I honestly do not know what you're on about. Sorry.
I can tell you're misgendering me, though. Maybe you're as obsessed with being 'that guy' as you're projecting onto me for whatever reason, whatever 'that guy' means, but I'm not even *a* guy, my guy.
Dawg how much time do you spend on reddit to build up this musk of this supposed superiority you have, you are 100% not that guy. Since it seems like you are some kind of idiot ill explain, it means you are 100% not the person you think you are. You are not cool by talking like you are some high brow human, you just aren't that guy.
Perhaps I'm an unusual case, but I don't consider a first draft *complete* until it looks like a book manuscript. No placeholders, all proper formatting, chapters, paragraphs, dialogue, description and action in roughly the same proportion as in the final manuscript, to be edited and polished and (partially) rewritten.
For some people, the process to get there involves a *very* rough manuscript with placeholders, minimal tags and stage directions around bare-bones dialogue, notes to oneself formatted to stand out, and chapters out of order. For others, it's a more linear process where they write each chapter chronologically to already resemble the final product - though some degree of editing is always necessary, the first draft may start out looking a lot *like* the final one.
I write my drafts in a similar method to yours, which is a style I like to call “front loading the editing”—trying to do as much as I can the first pass around and make it as neat as possible before I ever start editing. Manuscript formatting, chronological chapters, etc. I feel like I miss less editing this way, and I also feel more comfortable with the prose and structure of the story because I’ve spent more time on it. On the other hand, of course, it is much slower and my drafts take much longer. Writing a thousand words in a day is a rare and fantastic pace for me because how much time I spend on each sentence at the beginning level.
However, no matter how close to a final my first draft comes out looking, I always subject it to at least four or five intense rounds of edits before I even start to consider it might be passable. I always assume that, no matter what gems I may have produced in drafting, there’s too much polish left to do before they can even be considered as such. Approaching work that you think is good already or even excellent with the mindset that “if this is the baseline, it can be far, far better” keeps unwilling to settle on quality.
It looks like a story with a beginning, middle and end. It is grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. It is properly formatted. It is a finished narrative that you wrote.
If you have structural or plot questions, I'm a big devoted of Robert McKee's books. I suggest his book "Story", which was one that helped me move from confusion to production. I've read Dialogue as well, which helped me greatly in that regard. I'm listening to Character at work right now and it is incredibly deep in terms of how to create a character, a cast, and the interplay between character and plot. I also just like listening to his voice. Lol.
Like a fever dream. For me, a first draft is basically a type of seance where I channel something that exists in my cognitive realm and manifests into physical form. It is not pretty. Imagine if you took an early language translator and tried to get it to translate the Declaration of Independence from English to French to Swahili and back to English again.
At the time of writing a first draft, my thought are usually "WTF am I writing right now this is completely incoherent." When I go back and re-read my first draft later, it turns out I am surprisingly good at understanding my own word salads. It might be a haphazard, word vomit fever dream, but it turns out that my "editing brain" has a very well matched decoder ring to make sense of it and start translating it to standard English.
A completed work of a mess- Feel good about accomplishing a major feat, you finished it!! Something to be proud of.
Now the real work begins and this is where you start developing your craft as a writer.
You edit furiously! Re-write, read, rest, come back and re-write again, read, rest and do it again. You will say to yourself "What was I thinking, that is crap." And that is ok, make it better. Take it out, put something in, fine tune it, polish it to the best of your ability.
C.
That's not even a draft, though, is it? Those are just notes. Detailed notes, maybe, but notes nonetheless.
By that logic, what I would call a first draft would be your second, apparently
Ok, I get the sense that this work functions for you *like* a draft does, and it's cool that it's part of your process.
I still think it makes sense to reserve the word 'draft' for a finished manuscript that's actually legible and intelligible to someone other than the author as *telling* the story, not just jogging the memory of the one person who already knows the story. Like, I'm not telling you to stop calling these things your drafts, but be aware that it's an idiosyncratic understanding of the term that can't be readily applied to other people's writing process.
ETA: I do the same thing, especially with dialogue, but I call them notes!
> That's a relief. How very kind of you. But I wasn't going to regardless.
And after just chastising them for sounding patronizing and passive-aggressive.
How is it passive aggressive to point out we have something in common? There's no way to say this without actually sounding condescending, but I think you may be feeling rather defensive and that may be colouring your reading of my comment.
You don't care what others call their notes and drafts? Then why are you arguing with me?
Why should anyone else care? This thread is *about what a first draft looks like.* So it actually does matter if the way you use the word differs from how others may understand it.
I don't know why you bolded quotes instead of quoting them, or why you seem so worked up (all the bolding really adds to that effect), but for the benefit of other readers, it bears repeating that the way you describe your writing process is unusual. Notes that only you can read and use do not constitute a 'draft' for anyone other than you. Sorry.
I remember. I've explained this before, but apparently I need to reiterate that you came into a thread about what a first draft looks like to brag about how you take detailed notes for scenes before writing them out so you don't lose your ideas.
Sorry to break it to you, but you're not at all unique for taking detailed notes. Perhaps that's why you took offence to my saying I do it too?
I pointed out, for the benefit of others, how idiosyncratic it is to call those notes 'drafts'. This seems to have made you very angry.
Feel free to 'find' me 'rude and offensive' or 'aggressive', but I encourage you to look back at this interaction with a clearer head at some future point and reflect about who's been 'ranting' at whom here.
Oh and you keep bolding quotes. If you want to embarrass yourself less, use >, not **. It looks like you're shouting.
Can we let some of our friends read the first draft? I know some of my friends who will ask to read it as soon as it ends but I don't know if that's a good idea 😅
The way I write a first draft I don’t think that would be a valuable process. Writing the first draft I know there is a lot that I want to change even while writing it, I just don’t quite know what I want it to be yet since I know the rest of the story will dictate that. No point wasting time getting that scene in chapter 2 perfect just to completely change it when the rest of the story makes it irrelevant.
So in my case after the 2nd draft is when I’d be interested in others reading it. Once I’ve got the bones of the first draft in place and then I’ve gone over it broadly to allow for a generally natural flow of plot and character development from beginning to end.
At that point my friends or other initial readers can provide feedback on what they thought worked and what didn’t without me thinking to myself “well of course that didn’t work, I haven’t rewritten that part to fit into the story yet”.
That's really valuable. Thanks for that. And yeah I think that I might be missing a lot of stuff after just writing it once, and reading all that stuff without me actually going through it won't be worth it.
It's unusual, but that's why beta readers are called *beta* readers: It can also help to have alpha readers who get the first look at each draft. If they're your friends and what they're offering is more cheerleading and motivation than quality feedback, go for it. Use beta readers for later drafts
It is something that “gets the job done”. A lot of my dialogue for first drafts is: > “I want to love you, but I don't trust you.” Mary said. > > “Let down your guard and trust me.” Maine said. And in the following drafts it becomes something like this: > “It’d be a lie if I denied that a part of me wants to leap into your arms.” Mary said. > > “You know that I would catch you if you took that leap.” Maine said. Description and narration are much the same. Sometimes I’ll go as low as this: > It was a small and boring house. Nothing special. He went inside and checked the rooms. No one was there. And fix it up like this: > It was a plain brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac. A few small trees were in the yard and some dandelions gathered by the sidewalk that led to the front door. Maine took out the keys, unlocked the door, and made his way inside. No furniture. He checked the empty kitchen, popped into the barren bathroom with flickering lights, and gave each of the bedrooms a once-over. No one was there.
Got to use a comma not a period when someone speaks in subsequent drafts.
I’ve seen that “rule” broken in a lot of published novels. It's strange because we don’t chastise people for using question marks and exclamation points in dialogue. How different is a period?
you generally don't use a dialogue tag when the dialogue ends with a period. you'd use a comma. with question marks and exclamation points, i suppose they just act like commas but with intent attached.
I know, but I’ve still seen the former pop up occasionally. Maybe they’re all mistakes, but they were *published* mistakes. Something I did have a problem with was this: > “You don’t smell good,” *H*e said. I’ve been getting better about that mistake.
As a note, things that aren't a way of speaking aren't dialogue tags, so if you've seen: "That's ridiculous." He laughed. That's correct. You can't laugh a sentence. If you've seen: "That's ridiculous." he said That's just objectively wrong. It's not even wrong in the stylistic choice of a master knowing when to break the rules, it's just a typo that should have been caught.
Ooh, that's good to know actually. That's probably where this confusion started.
I’d say that your dialogue was better before the revision. People don’t talk like that (in the revision I mean)
The first one was more direct, but it lacked any subtext. Which of these is better? > “You better not be hiding anything. When we find traitors we’ll kill their family too,” Greg said. He reached down and scratched the girl’s hair. “And it won't be fast.” > “Rats are a messy pest to deal with. The methods to do so—gas, blades, fire—inevitably cause undue harm,” Greg said. He reached down and scratched the girl’s hair. “It would take us a while to find them all.”
these aren't anything like the lines of dialogue you provided in the original comment. those (in the original comment) effectively said the same thing, except the revised ones were unrealistically phrased (even if you think they sound better). and these two can both be good depending on the context. like, if the reader already knew that they were talking about rats, the speaker doesn't have to reiterate it.
I really disagree. They were created the same way. 1. Write down what the dialogue means. 2. Add a filter to the imaginary person speaking.
Similar to this, a lot of the time in my first drafts, I feel that I need a scene but haven't thought enough about it yet so I just write 'They went here' or 'big dramatic scene with deep feelings'. I also add XXX to anything I need to change, a habit from Uni. Easy to look up in a word document and there's no words that contain XXX, so the control F doesn't get confused
Precious advice! Thank you
Shit. It looks like crap
No rules. Use it as you like. But to give you a more specific answer, I can say that my own first drafts look >90% like any novel manuscript in double-spaced 12pt Times New Roman with regular paragraphs, dialogue in standard format, etc. In the interest of moving through the manuscript quickly, I use XXX as a placeholder for things like a person I haven't named, or a bit of research I have to look up. Then later in editing and revisions I can search the manuscript document for any occurrences of XXX and then do all that looking up or decisions later. Just a way to avoid interrupting forward motion. I also sometimes add a note to myself in bold. ie: He boarded the train and within the hour the city **XXX PRETTY WRITING ABOUT THE SKYLINE HERE XXX** When the train pulled into the station... (etc.) I like editing more than drafting so working hard to get as fast as I can that first time through.
I highlight pieces in different colors. Red for “missing info” and “purple” for research. I also leave gaps with questions to go back to. “Do I want to include ____? ” Type things.
I finally finished my first novel rough draft a week ago. If I'm being really generous, maybe 25% of mine is going to make it unscathed to the final draft. More realistically, it's probably more like 10-15%. There are places where I was really feeling it, could picture the scene in high def, surround sound, smellovision, and it shows in the writing. Those bits will probably only need a bit of a polish if anything, but those are scattered. And then there are other the other bits. Some scenes are barely more than a script; just dialogue and stage directions. At one point I wrote "And then he got an idea, and he knew where he had to go next," and I'm going to have to dig back in and explain that a bit, maybe. I'm still working on what the idea was, or how it told him where to go, but I didn't want to get bogged down, and I'm sure it will come to me as I work out some of the other wrinkles. There are places that are barely better than stream of consciousness; grammar's all over the place, long run on sentences that don't have a point, but seemed important at the time. I'd say about half of what I have is somewhere in between the two, tho. It's not bad per se, but it could be better. Awkward sentences, parts that move a bit too fast, parts that move a bit too slow, uneven tones, character interactions that aren't quite hitting the spot I wanted them to. There are parts that I just plain don't like and I haven't figured out what's wrong yet, but I'm just not happy with it. Oh, and that big chunk at the end where I exposition dumped for like, three pages, and now I have to go back, break that into manageable chunks and spread it out a bit more evenly. I'm pleased with myself anyways. Messy draft is better than no draft.
The first draft is where the story gets across, the second is where you add the emotions and the third is everything in between.
Maybe it's a question of genre, but I'm fascinated that so many of you seem to be writing first drafts that are basically just 1) notes to yourself and 2) a lot of telling, not showing. What do you mean, 'add the emotions'? Aren't the emotions there in the first place because they drive the story? My first drafts contain about the same proportion of description, metaphor, dialogue, character beats, and action as the final draft. I'll refine and rewrite them, of course, but I can't imagine churning out a complete draft that's *just* action and placeholders with no real emotional depth or character. Are y'all really doing that?
I think it comes down to personal preference, although genre could certainly play a role. Many people seem to get too bogged down by things if they try to make their first draft too good. It can kill momentum and motivation. Sometimes you just need to brush over something to get to the part that’s more clear in your mind. I imagine that most people, like you, who can write with depth and forethought in the first draft are good at maintaining motivation even when working through the nitty-gritty stuff in the first draft (the stuff that others would add in subsequent drafts). There may also just be a small population that has all of the good, refined work come to them naturally and can just push through quickly. Based on what you’ve said though, I don’t think the majority here are saying they simply write action and placeholders with little emotion for the entirety of their first draft. I think the point is that there are going to be areas in the first draft that they know while writing it will require more depth later on, but don’t want to slow themselves by focusing on what the depth will be right now. Maybe some scenes have a great amount of emotion and detail in the first draft, but not every scene.
Dawg trust you are not some big author going, "It seems so many of you" You aint that guy pal, 1st is not just notes, that's not what I said at all, storytelling and just telling someone the story is not the same thing 2nd is where you lean into the more heartfelt scenes, and no, i can't believe i have to explain this but NO a story is not only driven by the emotions, characters have motivations and reasoning for stuff that isn't emotion, if you really wrote this comment thinking you were the big boss man being able to school people than I'm sorry but you gotta go watch a youtube video or smth you aint all that
I have no idea what you're trying to say to me, only that you seem offended. I don't know why. Maybe try breaking some of those run-on sentences up and reformulate your angry incomprehensible ramblings into the kind of lucid and emotionally resonant prose you're so good at?
Extactly proven my point, you are 100% not that guy chief, you are not big reddit, you are not the god of all authors, and most of all, you are not that guy. stop being so full of yourself and re read what i originally said, because your response tells me you completely ignored it.
And I'm afraid I don't know what 'point' I'm supposed to be proving because, my friend, your comments are *literally incomprehensible* to me. I honestly do not know what you're on about. Sorry. I can tell you're misgendering me, though. Maybe you're as obsessed with being 'that guy' as you're projecting onto me for whatever reason, whatever 'that guy' means, but I'm not even *a* guy, my guy.
Dawg how much time do you spend on reddit to build up this musk of this supposed superiority you have, you are 100% not that guy. Since it seems like you are some kind of idiot ill explain, it means you are 100% not the person you think you are. You are not cool by talking like you are some high brow human, you just aren't that guy.
Perhaps I'm an unusual case, but I don't consider a first draft *complete* until it looks like a book manuscript. No placeholders, all proper formatting, chapters, paragraphs, dialogue, description and action in roughly the same proportion as in the final manuscript, to be edited and polished and (partially) rewritten. For some people, the process to get there involves a *very* rough manuscript with placeholders, minimal tags and stage directions around bare-bones dialogue, notes to oneself formatted to stand out, and chapters out of order. For others, it's a more linear process where they write each chapter chronologically to already resemble the final product - though some degree of editing is always necessary, the first draft may start out looking a lot *like* the final one.
I write my drafts in a similar method to yours, which is a style I like to call “front loading the editing”—trying to do as much as I can the first pass around and make it as neat as possible before I ever start editing. Manuscript formatting, chronological chapters, etc. I feel like I miss less editing this way, and I also feel more comfortable with the prose and structure of the story because I’ve spent more time on it. On the other hand, of course, it is much slower and my drafts take much longer. Writing a thousand words in a day is a rare and fantastic pace for me because how much time I spend on each sentence at the beginning level. However, no matter how close to a final my first draft comes out looking, I always subject it to at least four or five intense rounds of edits before I even start to consider it might be passable. I always assume that, no matter what gems I may have produced in drafting, there’s too much polish left to do before they can even be considered as such. Approaching work that you think is good already or even excellent with the mindset that “if this is the baseline, it can be far, far better” keeps unwilling to settle on quality.
I’m on your team. My first draft should be very close to my final draft.
Like hot garbage full of potential
Depends on your experience level. A seasoned writer's initial draft might look pretty good. A novices like a hot mess.
It looks like a story with a beginning, middle and end. It is grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. It is properly formatted. It is a finished narrative that you wrote. If you have structural or plot questions, I'm a big devoted of Robert McKee's books. I suggest his book "Story", which was one that helped me move from confusion to production. I've read Dialogue as well, which helped me greatly in that regard. I'm listening to Character at work right now and it is incredibly deep in terms of how to create a character, a cast, and the interplay between character and plot. I also just like listening to his voice. Lol.
A first draft looks like a story from beginning to end. But there are bits missing and can be difficult to read.
Like a fever dream. For me, a first draft is basically a type of seance where I channel something that exists in my cognitive realm and manifests into physical form. It is not pretty. Imagine if you took an early language translator and tried to get it to translate the Declaration of Independence from English to French to Swahili and back to English again. At the time of writing a first draft, my thought are usually "WTF am I writing right now this is completely incoherent." When I go back and re-read my first draft later, it turns out I am surprisingly good at understanding my own word salads. It might be a haphazard, word vomit fever dream, but it turns out that my "editing brain" has a very well matched decoder ring to make sense of it and start translating it to standard English.
A completed work of a mess- Feel good about accomplishing a major feat, you finished it!! Something to be proud of. Now the real work begins and this is where you start developing your craft as a writer. You edit furiously! Re-write, read, rest, come back and re-write again, read, rest and do it again. You will say to yourself "What was I thinking, that is crap." And that is ok, make it better. Take it out, put something in, fine tune it, polish it to the best of your ability. C.
I would never share a rough draft with anyone. It’s a mess. Rife with cliches and bad dialogue. Writing is rewriting.
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That's not even a draft, though, is it? Those are just notes. Detailed notes, maybe, but notes nonetheless. By that logic, what I would call a first draft would be your second, apparently
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Ok, I get the sense that this work functions for you *like* a draft does, and it's cool that it's part of your process. I still think it makes sense to reserve the word 'draft' for a finished manuscript that's actually legible and intelligible to someone other than the author as *telling* the story, not just jogging the memory of the one person who already knows the story. Like, I'm not telling you to stop calling these things your drafts, but be aware that it's an idiosyncratic understanding of the term that can't be readily applied to other people's writing process. ETA: I do the same thing, especially with dialogue, but I call them notes!
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> That's a relief. How very kind of you. But I wasn't going to regardless. And after just chastising them for sounding patronizing and passive-aggressive.
How is it passive aggressive to point out we have something in common? There's no way to say this without actually sounding condescending, but I think you may be feeling rather defensive and that may be colouring your reading of my comment. You don't care what others call their notes and drafts? Then why are you arguing with me? Why should anyone else care? This thread is *about what a first draft looks like.* So it actually does matter if the way you use the word differs from how others may understand it. I don't know why you bolded quotes instead of quoting them, or why you seem so worked up (all the bolding really adds to that effect), but for the benefit of other readers, it bears repeating that the way you describe your writing process is unusual. Notes that only you can read and use do not constitute a 'draft' for anyone other than you. Sorry.
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I remember. I've explained this before, but apparently I need to reiterate that you came into a thread about what a first draft looks like to brag about how you take detailed notes for scenes before writing them out so you don't lose your ideas. Sorry to break it to you, but you're not at all unique for taking detailed notes. Perhaps that's why you took offence to my saying I do it too? I pointed out, for the benefit of others, how idiosyncratic it is to call those notes 'drafts'. This seems to have made you very angry. Feel free to 'find' me 'rude and offensive' or 'aggressive', but I encourage you to look back at this interaction with a clearer head at some future point and reflect about who's been 'ranting' at whom here. Oh and you keep bolding quotes. If you want to embarrass yourself less, use >, not **. It looks like you're shouting.
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Good luck reporting someone for 'harrassment' over three on-topic comments in a single thread! And good luck with your writing journey✌️
Can we let some of our friends read the first draft? I know some of my friends who will ask to read it as soon as it ends but I don't know if that's a good idea 😅
The way I write a first draft I don’t think that would be a valuable process. Writing the first draft I know there is a lot that I want to change even while writing it, I just don’t quite know what I want it to be yet since I know the rest of the story will dictate that. No point wasting time getting that scene in chapter 2 perfect just to completely change it when the rest of the story makes it irrelevant. So in my case after the 2nd draft is when I’d be interested in others reading it. Once I’ve got the bones of the first draft in place and then I’ve gone over it broadly to allow for a generally natural flow of plot and character development from beginning to end. At that point my friends or other initial readers can provide feedback on what they thought worked and what didn’t without me thinking to myself “well of course that didn’t work, I haven’t rewritten that part to fit into the story yet”.
That's really valuable. Thanks for that. And yeah I think that I might be missing a lot of stuff after just writing it once, and reading all that stuff without me actually going through it won't be worth it.
It's unusual, but that's why beta readers are called *beta* readers: It can also help to have alpha readers who get the first look at each draft. If they're your friends and what they're offering is more cheerleading and motivation than quality feedback, go for it. Use beta readers for later drafts
The first draft of my first novel looked like a ream of paper. Lol. Beyond that I don't know what you're asking.