First Draft

Been busy at the hospital this past week, saving lives. It’s a tedious thing at times, though very rewarding. But due to the on again off again schedule, I find it difficult to start writing anything longer than a post or short story between shifts. Sometimes I’ll pull up yWriter and start fleshing out ideas for other stories. Or maybe I’ll pull out something I already have a 1st draft for and edit. But in general, the idea of starting a first draft on a long project when I only have a day or two off in between, is very daunting.

I’ll admit that I’ve worked at first drafts by “piece milling” them during times when I am working a lot. But I’ve noticed a discontinuity in my writing when I do this. So I prefer to sit down and spin out first drafts quickly. As such my first drafts could better be termed rough drafts, but the point is, the continuity of writing is much improved for me. What I mean is that the feelings of the characters as well as their actions within the story flow more naturally.

Most recently I wrote the draft for “The Apprentice” I shared the occasional excerpt from that story while I was writing it. And for what it’s worth, I did get interupted once during the draft. But at just 38,000 words, one interuption wasn’t a killer. I wrote the draft in three and a half days, and have spent countless hours and days after in revision. The result was that I got all of my thoughts and ideas poured onto the page right up front. When I began working through the second draft to clean up the prose and spelling errors, I found I was very happy with the way the story turned out. I’m now working through the corrections of my third and hopefully final draft before the release at the end of the month.

But starting tomorrow I have a long stretch off. Almost a week and a half, and I intend to turn out a rough draft for “Rogue.” I’m expecting a word count of around 80,000 to 100,000 so the draft will may well take all of the time I have off.

I finished the final draft of the outline for Rogue back in the middle of January and am very excited about starting it. So tomorrow it’s write time. I’ll write a few posts as I go to keep you all up to date on my progress. I will likely even throw in a few rough excerpts of things that I find I’m happy with as I go.