How do you number your drafts?
The TP Diaries, June 2024
Welcome to the June 2024 edition of The TP Diaries. Once a month, I share an update of what’s going on with my writing. This is NOT a glowing record of the perfect writing routine to guilt you into writing better. Think of this as the TP you need for your shitty draft. I get stuck all the time. I skip days. I change my mind. I start over. When I write, I make a MESS.
But, by reading my diary, you will also see the strategies I use to pick myself back up again and keep writing anyway.
But first…it’s podcast time!
I had the pleasure of being a guest of my friend and fellow book coach, Heather Davis on her podcast Speculative Fiction Writing Made Simple. We discussed strategies for writing LGBTQ+ characters with confidence and care. In each episode, Heather shares tons of great strategies and amazing resources for developing plot and character in your speculative fiction. Check it out!
What I’m Working On
I’m drafting a queer retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night set in an open-wheel racing league. Think: She’s the Man with gay racecar drivers. In May, I finished creating a scene-by-scene outline of the book. For the first three weeks of June, I started constructing my newest draft, in sequential order. This has mostly meant revising scenes I wrote in previous drafts but has also meant drafting some entirely new ones.
When I paused to go on vacation during the last week in June, my draft was a whopping 30,500 words.
Is this a draft which I see before me?
Right now, when people ask how my writing is going, I get to tell them it’s going amazingly well, and that I aspire to finish my current draft by the end of the summer.
My mom is one of those people who understands that a “finished” draft can mean a lot of different things. During our recent beach vacation, over some fruity cocktails she asked me where this draft fits in to the overall writing process.
This turned out to be a deceptively difficult question to answer.
In some ways, this will be a first draft, because it’s the first time this story will have a complete beginning, middle, and end, with every scene drafted.
In other ways, it’s much more developed than a first draft. After I did some exploratory writing, I did a ton of work to develop the plot and characters, meaning it won’t (or at least, shouldn’t) need much structural revision the way many first drafts do. Both my book coach, and one of my critique partners are reading this draft as I write it, and I’m doing some revisions along the way. So, while this is the first time I’ll get all the way to “the end,” this draft will be way more polished than your average first draft.
Plus, while I may have “written” 30,500 words of my draft in June, most of those words weren’t brand new.
So, is this a first draft? Or something else?
A draft by any other name…
I’ve always found the process of naming and numbering drafts to be a bit perplexing because there frequently isn’t a clear-cut moment where one draft ends and another begins – at least, not the way I write. Usually, that determination is based on when I feel like I need to create a new document in order to function.
I’ve also moved away from numbering my drafts. I think some writers might look at the document labeled “Draft 21” and see it as a mark of how hard they worked and how far they’ve come. For me, it started to get discouraging. Also, because of how my brain is, I would say to myself, this is basically draft 8, but also, a bit different from draft 8, so I’m going to call it Draft 8.1. Sometimes, there’ll even be an 8.2 or 8.3 before I finally give up and decide, actually, this is Draft 9.
Which, seriously, what does that even mean?
There are many craft books in the world prescribing how to write a book in a set number of drafts. I’m not a big fan of these philosophies because I think every writer and every book is different, but most of these books still do contain some useful ideas and strategies. (As long as you don’t hold yourself to the unrealistic standard of finishing every book you write in just three drafts.)
I particularly like Allison K. Williams’ approach to naming drafts in her book Seven Drafts. She names each draft or phase of drafting based on what the core focus is. What many folks call the first draft or zero draft, she calls “the vomit draft.” I’ve taken to calling it my “grocery draft” based on a metaphor Williams makes that writing that initial draft is like going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients. Then you come home, set all your ingredients on the counter and figure out what you’re actually making in the “story” and “character” drafts.
I had four “grocery” drafts. I’m now on the first of what I’ll call my story drafts. Instead of numbering, I’m identifying my draft by the date I started it: May 31, 2024.
How do you name and number your drafts?
Everyone has a different way of naming and numbering drafts. Share yours in the comments!