Drafts and Revisions, Fixed or Mutable?

A conversation that went on in the comments to this post seemed interesting enough at the time to move out to a front page post. It’s about drafts and revisions among other things.

I know a number of writers who work like Erik, who said of first drafts, unless I make a major discovery along the way or I screw something up massively I try to leave my work alone as much as possible. That number includes (I think) Wyrdsmiths’ own Doug Hulick. I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong. This produces a pretty distinct first draft.

Another school is one in which the writer is constantly making changes that ripple up and down the line. Lyda and I both do this. So I don’t really have a first draft, because I’m constantly making changes that then necessitate further changes throughout everything written so far, and because I do those changes at the time they occur to me. One part of the rough draft might have gone through ten revisions while another came straight off the keyboard and has never been touched.

I was talking about that with Sean on Thursday night and about how it affected and informed character. He was saying that one of the reasons that some writers might not want to force a character into doing something necessary for the plot but unnatural to their internal makeup is that they feel it might make the character flatter and more limited. That idea struck me as very odd, and I realized something about my process. I trust the plot (the story) more than I trust the character.

So, if I get to a critical point and I’ve built a character who, for lack of a better term, doesn’t want to do something it means (to me) that I made a mistake in crafting the character, so I go back and change the character’s past to make their actions in the present make sense. I don’t try to force the character to do something unnatural, I revise the character to make it natural. And one of the reasons it’s easy for me to do this mentally is that my first draft is very mutable.

So, anyway, here are the stages I go through:

1. Drafting stage, in which nothing is terribly fixed, though I do outline and follow that outline fairly closely. This is a very mutable draft and informed by critique from my writers group(s).

2. Clean up and beta draft. The end result of this is supposed to be a pretty clear and polished version for first readers.

3. Submission draft, i.e. going out to my agent and editor after I’ve made the changes I find useful from first readers.

4. Final draft, the submission draft with whatever changes my agent, editor and I agree on.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog Sept 30th 2006. Reposted as part of the reblogging project)

The original post also included these questions, but, as I’ve elected not to enable comments at kellymccullough.com, I’m separating them out below and people’s answers can be found at the Wyrdsmiths version:

So, what’s your drafting and revision process. Do you first draft? And, more importantly, why do you do it the way you do?