Writing the Discovery Draft

Also known as the rough draft, the first draft, and the vomit draft

The Storywriter’s Path

Also known as the rough draft, the first draft, and the vomit draft

Photo by Isaac Davis on Unsplash

Okay, so, you’re ready to write your book.

You’ve done some prep work — enough so that you know a bit about your characters, your settings, your plot and how the story ends.

Mapping the Novel
What you need to know before you start writingwritingcooperative.com

And you’re excited. Raring to go. Ready to write.

Let’s do it. What’s the best way to proceed?

I have some firm ideas about that which will help you finish.

Most important

But first, I must tell you something really important. It’s the number one thing you need to know about writing your first draft.

Resist the urge to edit.

The Best Writing Process
It’ll help insure you get your story out in the worldwritingcooperative.com

This draft — your first pass through — is all about getting words on the page. Nothing more! Your job is to finish the draft, not to make it perfect. This is why it is sometimes unpleasantly called the vomit draft. Because you are vomiting words on the page until you get to the end.

It’s about the discovery

And it is also why we call it the discovery draft. This time through, you, the author, are discovering the story. Yes, you’ve done some prep work and that’s great and helpful. But you will learn much more about the story as you write it. And you’ll know even more when you get to the end.

Subsequent drafts are for honing, refining, and figuring out how best to present the story to your readers. But, before you can do that, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

So, I repeat, do not edit.

If the thought of sitting down and writing 75,000 words sounds a bit daunting, I have some tips to help you.

Plan ahead

If you’ve done your prep work and written an outline or a list of scenes, all you have to do is follow it. Which sounds easy, right? But it can be hard to sit down at the computer, stare at scene you’re supposed to write that day and know where to start. So a bit of advance planning can go a long way.

Before your writing session, write down some ideas for the scene. Who will be in it? Where is it set? What’s the weather? What’s going to happen? What’s the conflict? What point does the scene serve? These thoughts will point you in the right direction to get started.

Know where you’re going

Which brings me to a related point. Not knowing where you’re going in your writing is the cause of nearly all writing blocks, in my opinion. You don’t know what to write next so you don’t write anything. And sometimes that not writing anything stretches to many days. And there goes the momentum you were creating.

So try always to know where you’re going. Hemingway famously stopped writing in the middle of a sentence so he’d know where to go at his next session. That doesn’t work for me, because half the time I forget what I wanted to express in the sentence. But if might for you. Or, you could write down a few ideas on your draft before you shut your computer down, or scrawl some notes on paper.

Set a daily word count goal

And remember, it doesn’t have to be big. Most writers can easily manage 1,000 a day — that’s four pages. And remember also, we’re not talking about polished prose here. Maybe you’re seriously pressed for time — how about 750 words? That’s three pages. And if you started today and wrote three pages for 30 days, that’s 90 pages. One-third of a book. A solid chunk.

It’s also fun to track your daily word goals on paper, or an app, or on your calendar. Some writers like to use gold stars or stickers to reward themselves when they’ve met their goals. It’s fun to reward yourself at the end of a week, too. Whatever keeps you motivated!

Make notes to yourself

I have a system I devised years ago when I wrote my first novel (lost in the sands of time, which is just as well, because it was unpublishable anyway). I kept a notebook next to my computer. In the front section, I designated a page per chapter. The back was for notes. So, as I was writing along, say, on chapter ten, if I realized I had to insert something in chapter two, I’d make a note of it. That way I didn’t have to stop in the heat of drafting to make the change.

At the end of the week, I’d go through my notes and transfer them to the page designated for each chapter. By the end of my draft, I not only had it finished, but a million ideas for improving it already, at least partially organized. I’ve used variations on this system ever since.

Utilize the power of the tk

Legend has it that the letters tk are the only two that never appear next to each other in the English language. (As always, there are exceptions to every rule. Case in point: the tree name Sitka. Oh well.) Because of this, the tk is commonly used to denote more to come. When you’re done drafting you can do a search for the tk and see what needs to be done.

The tk is most commonly done in all caps. But if I do that here, it will confuse the heck out of the Medium editor so my examples are in lower case.

Write out of order

There’s no law that says you have to write chapter one, followed by chapter two, followed by chapter three, and so on. I will admit that this is most often the way I draft, because I like to see how scenes and chapters build on one another. But if you’re not feeling excited about the scene on the lake, but can’t wait to write the scene in the boathouse — go for it. Don’t get blocked for the sake of writing chronologically.

Don’t edit

Have I mentioned this before? Okay, I have, but it bears repeating. Don’t edit. Okay, many people like to start a writing session by reading back over the last few pages they wrote and in this case, a few little editing tweaks are okay. But I’ve known far too many writers who never got a draft done because they kept editing and revising and going back over their first few pages. Don’t be that writer.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started! Good luck with your discovery draft.