How Rough is your Rough Draft?

That is the question my fellow YA Highwayers and I are answering today. (I have to giggle cause Word is trying to change Highwayers to Highwaypersons. LOL)

Back to the question at hand. It’s easy and hard to answer. I write…sparse when I fast draft. And I like to write the entire book before I go back over to edit it. I usually come in around 35k, which means I need to add another 10-15k in edits in Round 2. (Then even more after my agent reads it and points out all the places I left big holes.) That’s actually the easy part. The hard part is adding dimension. I suck at that. I’m great at going off on a totally irrelevant subplot and losing direction, completely forgetting what and why my characters were doing something. They don’t need to solve the problem, cause look, they are doing something totally cooler! Riverdance!

But during that first draft, it doesn’t matter if they all want to jump up and down in unison to weird music. My rough draft is simply getting the story in all its unedited glory onto the page. The major players, the plot, the subplots and where everything happens. A 185-page outline. It’s usually pretty clean, just empty. Like a house you just bought. The structure is there, the rooms are there, and if your lucky, the previous owner left the appliances so you can wash your dirty moving clothes.

But then you get to move in and decorate, paint and call it yours. The second round is the magical one where the story comes to life. Some people I know can write a first draft and have it so concise and clean, they can turn it in as is with no editing. I’m not one of them. But my way works for me, and it still allows for the occasional off plot treks. And Riverdancing.