If I sound like I’ve just contradicted myself, I don’t think I have. Because you can do that — writing down all your thoughts and ideas about your story — without drafting and redrafting. You can do that by applying a thorough and creative process of OUTLINING your story first.

If you understand story structure well, and if you are aware of the criteria of the various elements that go into it, then you can evolve your story at the outline phase without doing a draft. And without remotely compromising the creative process. Once the outline is solid, then your draft comes alive immediately, with your best thinking and all the elements in place, in the RIGHT place.

I’ve sold three first drafts to a major NY publisher doing it this way. It works. It makes the drafting process not only more efficient, but more creative, empowering and rewarding, too.

One thing that you touched upon that i think is really important is to let your thoughts flow and write them down. Once you have got all of your thoughts and ideas together you can then start to put together your piece of literature.

Dealing with the side-tracking and distractions of internal mind chatter is one of the most difficult challenges I face whenever I write. I have to constantly remind myself, “DRAFT”. One of the fantastic things about writing is that every word we write is not final until published. The writing process is one of constant growth and change. Having put a word here does not mean it is fixed to that point, it can be cut, moved, deleted, reworded, reworked…

I suppose this too is a sense of the “Swiss Cheese Draft”. Knowing, accepting, even embracing the imperfections that are inevitable in the early stages of writing. Getting the words down is more important then getting them right.

The good news is that with practice we make fewer mistakes, have fewer gaps, and can write more completely the first time. Getting into the habit of writing regularly is the first step. :-)

@Paul, Thanks for writing. I call your habit of switching to a complementary (or entirely different) project when the one you’re working on gets stale “domain shifting,” and it’s a very useful skill to cultivate! Been meaning to blog about this tool. Your post’s inspired me to do so soon.

@Dave, your forehead-smacking “what was I thinking” mention made me laugh out loud. So true! Great suggestion to keep old drafts…as you say, reviewing them later can be fun and instructive, too.

@Matthew, I hadn’t thought of filling the brackets with entirely unrelated thoughts that come up during writing (grocery list, etc.), but it’s a *fantastic* idea, one I’ll remember & recommend (& attribute to you). Your technique speaks to one of my primary “Relaxed Writer” messages: that with awareness, we can boost our productivity by not buying into the “Either / Or” dualisms we create (art “vs.” craft; writing “vs.” life, form “vs.” content, etc.) but instead, with practice, we can learn to work in both realms simultaneously, as you do when writing. Very cool stuff.

@Larry, I agree, deliberately blueprinting story form is good practice, especially in the initial stages of learning one’s craft or a new genre or form. In the comments to your new (well-written, btw. congrats!) WTD guest post, you say: “Craft can be learned, art must be discovered.” To discover often requires us to invest time in play, exploration or risk-taking on the page, and this “Swiss Cheese draft” exercise is just one of many ways to get there.

@Missm, @Marla – thanks for saying hello. :)

@Mary, off to check out your new post at Good Life Zen. Looking forward to it.

Great to meet you, everyone! Will check back again soon.

Thanks!
-Matthew

Nice, thanks for sharing the link about the online stopwatch. Normally, I use a timer on my widget dashboard. I’m a Mac user. It gets the job done. Thanks again,

-Mig

Three things:

1. I love Swiss cheese.
2. My name is Marla.
3. Love the place card thing–I do this all the time but had never heard anyone talk about it.

Off to check out your site!

But here’s a thought. In my view the most powerful drafting tool has to do with understanding the essence and the elements of your story before you draft it. The reason a second draft is far more effective than a first is that the writer has learned more about the story in the first draft (which assumes they began with a germ of an idea and knew little about where it might go from there)… and that process continues through subsequent drafts until the entire architecture of the story is clear and the characters have become fully realized and flush with backstory, motivation, hesitation, color, nuance and arc.

Polishing the writing along the way is as much seizing an opportunity as it is the purpose of the draft. The real purpose of drafting is story development, while buffing up the words is more a polishing process.

Which brings me to this compelling thought: imagine if you knew a LOT about your story BEFORE you wrote a first draft? Some people use – - and love — the drafting process as a journey of story discovery, and that’s fine, it’s wonderful in fact. But there’s an alternative, and a quicker and equally effective one.

Other writers rely on criteria-driven checklists (the content and mastery of the elements of an effective story in a generic sense) coupled with the creative story-sequencing process. Sort of like draping a fine tapestry over a pre-fabricated infrastructure, both of which are of the author’s design, and neither of which compromises the creative process otherwise experienced during the drafting process.

It’s what architects do, using standards and criteria to design buildings that can’t afford multiple drafts. It’s blueprinting, pure and simple.

If you can pull this off — and I know you can, because I’ve done it and I’ve seen it done — you can write a first draft in which the story is already fully realized. Even a first draft that sells. The draft becomes the crystalization and evolution of something that you already know works, because like an architect brings art to the fundamentals of structure, we writers (who are also stuck with the fundamentals of structure, like it or not, or admit it or not) can do the same.

It’s not “outlining,” per se, it’s much more. It’s an application of story architecture (which — again — like it or not, is fairly standard and templatable) to the glorious and creative fulfillment of a story.

Hope this helps. It has me. Thanks Marla and Mary.