Zero Drafting

It's amazing how many words one can put down when one is trying not to care about them.

It's impossible for me not to care at all--on a computer, I am constantly making small changes in word choice or in small additions or deletions that I might not even consciously notice. But the goal with "zero drafting" is to get the words down as fast as possible by focusing on the story rather than the crafting of the prose. The psychological aspect is that calling it "zero" instead of "first" helps me to ignore my inner editor.

Of course,"story" and "prose" are inextricable in a way I'm not sure I can explain; it's just something I feel is true. But at the same time, "story" can be pared down to mean simply "things that happen" and "characters they happen to." For zero drafting, I write scenes that I think ought to have happened to my characters, in order to see if their behavior in those scenes seems consistent and interesting. I think of zero draft as "figuring stuff out on the page."

The important bit is that all of this zero draft is subject to change. If it doesn't work, out it goes, no harm, no foul. Some things might linger in the manuscript for a really long time, only to be cut when I'm almost done. That doesn't matter. Those words will have served their "figuring out" purpose.

I normally cut thousands of words, possibly as many as fifty thousand, over the course of writing a novel of maybe 100,000 words. So I might as well not stress too much over wordcount while I'm figuring things out.

At the same time, attaining large wordcounts every day while drafting gives me a sense of accomplishment that's hard to beat. Part of this is "figuring out" seems to take more words than refined, edited prose. I'm stopping action scenes in the middle and writing down infodumps, made up on the spot, for my own information. I'm describing things that might be peripheral to the scene going on, because I realized I know what something ought to look like and I don't want to forget about it. And I'm writing scenes that I might not need to show in the final product; they might be backstory, or irrelevant except to my backbrain.

It feels wasteful. But if I don't struggle through the zero draft, the story won't get written at all. You can't revise what you haven't written.

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