Planning: The Zero Draft

[cathschaffstump]

There is one great thing about this darned troll story--it has caused me to think about my writing process. I'm also teaching Composition One for the last time this summer, and that's caused me to think about what I'm telling my students about composing. I've been getting really reflective.

One of the things I do that is useful to me is write a zero draft. These exploratory excursions into a story help me form my characters, plots, and settings. Many people do this planning as they outline and work on their characters. I find that I prefer the improv approach, at least initially.

What I'm interested in doing is seeing how characters interact and bounce off one another. I'm interested in their motivations and relationships. I am also interested in sketching settings and basic plot. I'll write kaboodles of these words.

I'd say I throw 80 percent of this away at the beginning. Later, as I progress through the draft, I'll throw away less and less.

Does this sound wasteful to you? If you're quantifiable (like being certifiable, only with numbers), you may well think so. Why write words you don't intend to keep, at least in some form?

The zero draft is my answer to the outline. I'm pretty sure that the ideas I form during the zero draft are the ones that form my real first draft of a scene, the one I'm going to keep. The first scene of the troll story was a batch of faeries stealing the princess away. The only piece of that that stayed was the main idea. Grant started life as a kid, rather than a teen. There was originally a father, rather than a sister, tracking the baby down. Quartz had a much larger role in the first two drafts.

The zero draft gives me ideas. I'll find that I don't like something, but even as I'm writing it, I'll have the idea that I really want to use. I'll write the new scene, the new first draft which wouldn't have happened without the zero draft.

From the first scenes that feel right to me, I'll begin to take some time to plan. The planning process, the minimal outlining I do also changes often as old scenes are replaced by better ideas.

At a given time during the writing of a novel, I will have zero draft scenes. Somewhere in my brain, ideas are being sifted, discarded, and created. I don't think this is uncommon for writers.

The zero draft also makes me a shameless writer. I'll write tons of horrible crap. From that fertilizer, I will grow something passable, a first draft. As I move through the revision of the first draft, we begin the zero draft process with new scenes.

It's important for me to also get people to look at the crap. It's not that I think the book is ready for prime time. I want to see if the ideas I like float with other people as well. It helps me make some sifting choices.

On the whole, then, I find the zero draft helpful to me. I understand Cherie Priest also writes a zero draft, although I don't know if her zero draft is similar to mine.

Writing handbooks talk about the zero draft as a perfectly valid way to plan, right up there with clustering, outlining, and listing. How do you get yourself started? Have you identified your planning process yet? If you've yet to find a way of planning that works for you, you might give this one a try, especially if you have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and you don't mind throwing some things away.

Catherine

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.