Thread: ...But just HOW bad are your first drafts?

Originally Posted by Cefor

I've done this weird technique; where I write down a lot of crappy sentences and the general idea of the chapter first, sometimes leaving out big chunks but writing 'he asks her about the history, she tells him' and that sort of thing.
Later I go back and actually 'fill it in', writing descriptions, tidying up and writing dialogue and all the other bits that actually make the story good (well... that's relative).

Not that weird. Will Self uses post-it notes in much the same way, jots things down as they occur to him, plasters a wall in them, and when he thinks he has enough, he takes them all down, puts them in order and starts writing.

After a while revising my second novel I've found that reading the original draft of it again would likely frustrate me so much as to make me hate the whole book. It was that bad (and that old). Seriously, just about anything that could be wrong with it, was.

I'm still trying to find an effective process (i.e. a process that gets me from idea to finished, polished manuscript). All the paid writing I've done up to this point has been nonfiction -- columns, editorials, and news -- which rarely exceeds 1,000 words. For those, I don't outline, though I usually brainstorm. The first draft is about 80-90% similar to the final draft.

But now that I'm venturing into fiction, I need to continue searching for a new process. Even on my meds, I have short attention span for things that don't have a conceivable end. And even less of an attention span for things that don't have a deadline. I've tried writing novels on the fly. I can't finish them. I've tried basic outlines. I either lose interest or I start finding flaws in the outline that discourage from even trying to fix the outline, let alone continue writing scenes.

I'd never finished writing the first draft of a novel, until December 2009. I developed an outline prior to November, and then I trudged through NaNoWriMo and ended up with a 57,000-word manuscript. The plot needs revisions, and the writing is garbage. Not to say my style is totally unsalvageable, but I adopted a minimalistic process just to get through it. I have placeholders for descriptions, character names, and even plot devices. Some scenes are 90% dialogue because I just couldn't bring myself to write any good action or description that day. In other words, the manuscript is underwritten, whereas it seems like most people have the opposite problem.

To answer the question, "How bad" is my first draft: Bad enough to make me wonder if anyone else's drafts are this bad.