THE FIRST DRAFT OF YOUR STORY: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

With the creation of an electronic method of writing, the idea of the first draft was doomed. We’re still waiting on the paperless office, though. And jetpacks. Jetpacks to take us to work. Oh, wait, writers work from home. Writers will never have jetpacks.
   We’ll have jetpacks before we have the paperless office. Also. Covid. Almost everyone suddenly worked from home.
   For legal reasons, I should point out that writers work on the move, and not just at home. Writing is one of the few professions you can do while asleep. You wake up and write that dream down.
   What is the first draft of a story?
   It’s a pause. And that pause is to remind myself of the word’s spelling. A game of draughts. The breeze snaking through that door is a draught. The ship’s draught is important at all times, though most especially in shallower waters. Our hero took in great gulping draughts of beer. Yes, draught beer.
   But we move away to the other spelling for certain things. A military draft. Yes, yes, but that is more likely to be referred to as conscription. A bank draft is a fancier form of a cheque. Both methods of payment are in decline, thanks to the electronic world.
   An overdraft is also a banking term. Perhaps that spelling is favoured to avoid confusion with an overdraught, which we’ll call an engineering term dealing with air-flow and furnace operation.
   You are unlikely to deal with drafts in daily life, unless…
   The preferred method of payment is a banker’s draft.
   You are conscripted but prefer the alternative terms draft and draftee.
   By coincidence, accident, or happenstance…you are American. In which case, draft is the spelling.
   Which leaves writing. If you write a document, you write a draft. Much importance is placed, in the online world, on the concept of the first draft. What is it? Oh, just your initial attempt at writing cat-spew.
   The first draft is looked upon as something you will improve later, in stages, by means of a second draft, a third draft, and so on. If you have the strength to walk a long and weary road, there’ll be many drafts to your book.
   Is that true?
   In the electronic age…no.
   Unless…
   You write your story in a file, and you take that file and copy it and rename it as the second draft and do all your fixing in the new file. That is one way to operate. You will have drafts that are defined clearly. I don’t recommend that level of filing. Too much scope for mixing up files and versions.
   It is possible to see all the changes you’ve made in a single document. Doesn’t mean you should, though.
   This blog post is in a single file. I’m changing the writing as I go along. Approaching 500 words, or a third of the proposed blog post, I see I’ve revised this file loads of times. But the basic template for this file, the blank file, has already been revised twice. So we knock off a revision for that. And then ask what revision is.
   Saving.
   The number of times I’ve stopped to save the file. Not really the number of times I’ve revised the text in the file. The number of saves is not an indicator of the number of drafts. Is this the first draft? Do you only call a first draft a first draft once you’ve reached the end of it? People are calling the file a first draft before they’ve typed in it, so, no.
   This’ll be the first draft when it sees publication. All the rewrites are being done as I go along. When I talked about banking, I stopped to check what a banking draft was. Oh, it’s a fiddly version of a cheque.
   Wait. The regular version of a cheque is a fiddly version of a cheque. So we use the American spelling for a military draft, even though we tend to talk about conscription. And the army is the army, rather than the military. But I worked my way through those minefields to reach the spelling I was after. I checked the cheque.
   If stopping by woods to research on a snowy evening means revising a sentence by unclogging snow from my boots and killing off words in that sentence…am I still on the first draft? Not sure I am.
   Number of save points on a file is irrelevant. I have to save the file and leave it just to read up on the number of saves. This creates an artificial addition to the number of saves. I save this file so that I can leave the chair and deal with business elsewhere. It’s important to save the file after a paragraph or two.
   If you aren’t saving every time you leave your device, you aren’t saving enough. I tend to save after a paragraph. Except, as I am sitting typing this, I realise that I save after the completion of each sentence.
   And I also realise that I save if I leave the file to research a thing online. So I save more frequently than I’d thought. I’ll save if I leave the chair. If I must switch the machine off, I’ll save the file – even if I’ve just saved the file. And I’ll save if I feel I’ve written something vital. Possibly in mid-sentence.
   Now you know why I haven’t lost data.
   What is revised during all of these saves? I could switch TRACK CHANGES on, but – by fuck – it is annoying. The option fills the page with angry red text, and I just don’t care enough about every minor change to follow the geological record.
   I care enough to make a change, and I am safe in the knowledge that I move the fuck on after changing something. No need to have all this red bullshit glowing on the page as I try to string a few words into….ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
   Wipes drool from mouth.
   Never said it was my mouth. I endure red underlining for potential spelling issues, and that’s as far as I take the assistance. While I’m a fan of tidying text, the ability to track changes needs to die in a fire.
   Is there a way of following progress in the draft without tracking changes? You could print a story off once you are at the end and then take a pen to it. Even in this electronic office, I prefer to make major changes after reading a printout. The screen flakes you out in ways that don’t occur when staring at the printed page.
   Anything else? Isolated text. I keep a file for NOTES. Every story has a file, often taken from hastily-scribbled notes written in pen on scraps of paper. I do a lot of work in there, on notes for each story…
   That’s where changes are thrashed out. Is that where the bulk of the first draft lives? Note-taking varies in depth by story. More notes for a book. Fewer notes for a short story. That is the one true way, unless it isn’t true for you. I can’t help you, there.
   More isolated text. This is rarer. You write up a scene in a chapter. And it isn’t working. So you remove the scene from the chapter. If this is your first draft, suddenly the removal creates a second draft. And replacement of that scene will generate a third draft.
   It is rare that I abandon a line of storytelling within a chapter. Why keep the abandoned text? Maybe I’ve jumped ahead of the story and written the scene too early. It’ll find its place later in the text.
   Keep fragments and chunks like that. They can be used elsewhere in your work. Doesn’t mean they’ll be used, but have the kindling ready if you want to start a fire.
   Try to keep fragments and chunks like that.
   There you go. That’s the original sentence from a few moments ago. I decided to take some of Yoda’s advice. Not all of it. Frankly, Yoda’s advice is pretty shitty at times. But, hey, muppet in a STAR WARS movie. Gets a pass.
   Does slashing two words from a sentence, just after writing that sentence, create another draft number? How about typing fast and adding two commas to the preceding sentence after the sentence was over? Does that add another draft number?
   But we aren’t getting to the heart of it. As a concept, the first draft is your first attempt at the story. Then you go back in with a flamethrower, looking for trouble. My advice is to stick to the story you wrote.
   If you want to change the plot significantly…go and write a new story. Do you feel the need to ditch characters and introduce others? Go and write a new story. Want to change the background? The setting? Go and write a new story.
   Often I write blog posts, around 1,500 words, and – acting to a deadline – I put the blog post out there after checking the spelling and maybe doing a legal run over a few things to avoid getting myself into trouble in court.
   So…writing a blog post is as close as I get to a first draft that is also the finished draft. There’s often little of significance that you can change inside 1,500 words. You don’t make great alterations on the back of a napkin.
   On the larger field of the novel, you leave yourself open to far more continuity errors. I’ve never published a novel off the back of the first stab at the text. That novel looks like Caesar with the number of stabs it has taken by the time it sees the digital light of day.
   We’re over 1,500 words, now. Time to end. Write your story. Leave it for a wee while. Look at it again. Iron out the bumps. File off the rough edges. But remember this above all else: write your story. I never set out to write a story by concerning myself with the number of drafts. No. I am here to write a story.
   Write that story. Get it down in the immediacy of the telling, and worry about continuity glitches and legal matters later. If you are sitting down to write the first draft of your novel, get up, fuck off, have a coffee, and come back to write the story instead. Readers don’t give a flying fuck about the draft. The concept of the first draft shouldn’t get in the way of filling blank pages. Do not obsess over the first draft. Be obsessed, instead, with completing the last page.