as small as a world and as large as alone, I could cry reading your answer on finishing...

6:23pm June 18, 2014

vefanyar asked: I could cry reading your answer on finishing things. Though I do tend to finish what I write (not always, but often), being disgusted by my writing (10+ years at it, no talent or voice to speak of) struck home... but it never would have occured to me to affirm that I'm producing crap instead of just forcing my way through a process I do enjoy but can't put on the page right and lately thought about giving up. I haven't tried it yet, but "liberating" doesn't even begin to cover this. Thank you.

dduane:

I’m very glad to be of assistance; think nothing of it.

But seriously, until relatively recently there’s been way too much weight put on the concept of producing overly polished early drafts, and it’s probably caused any number of people any amount of grief. (I would also be tempted to suggest that at least some of the angst has been associated with a concern that I’ve heard voiced by a number of beginning writers recently: that they hate showing anything to their betas that isn’t nearly perfect.)

The corrective for this problem is embodied in a buzzword-y phrase/term that’s gained a lot of traction recently: “draft zero*”. It’s unclear who coined the phrase, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to track it down here. Especially since, as so often happens, there are now multiple definitions of what “draft zero” implies. Some of them invoke very, very loose and unstructured writing: others, writing that’s more structured.

For my purposes, “draft zero” implies the novel or screenplay or poem or song or whatever that you write to tell the story to yourself.

(inserting a cut here because this is going to get a bit scatological momentarily)

Read More