Ep. 259: How Do You Actually Fast-Draft a Novel? Bonus MiniEpisode

In this bonus mini-episode, Rachael talks about how to actually break free from your outline and get down to the good stuff: actually fast-drafting. How do you start? What does skeletoning your work look like? When do you know you’re ready? Don’t miss this episode, brought to you by Rachael’s awesome patrons. 

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #259, this is a bonus mini episode answering your questions. If you are at the Patreon level of $5 and up a month, you can ask me any questions you want. I’m only got one today, so it’s going to be a short episode, but it’s a good one. And it’s going back to my roots of what I really love to talk about. So let’s get into it. This is from Kate.

[00:00:41] Hello again, Kate. All right. She says related to her previous question which was the last mini episode, as I shared, I’m having a problem finishing drafts and hence, I’m working on my outline with story bits and mystery bits to hopefully finish my next draft for real. But I think I’m having another problem, which is that because a previous draft that didn’t work and I abandoned, I think I’m afraid to move beyond the outline and into the story. I’ve been trying to outline for weeks and I’ve run out of ideas, but I’m afraid to write because lost my place because I think I need to beef up my outline still more. How do I know when I have outlined enough? I think that fast drafting or skeleton drafting might help me, but I’ve never tried that before. My previous attempts at writing were fully fleshed out as best I could do with character dialogue et cetera. I would like to try a first draft in an effort to make my story and mystery mechanics work as quick as possible, then put the meat on it, but I’m feeling at a loss as to how to really do this. I think my perfectionism might be getting in the way and making me resist sketching something versus writing it fully.

[00:01:50] I purchased your book on fast drafting your memoir and I look forward to reading this for more info, but could you comment on this in regards to doing a mystery story? How does one go about fast drafting? Thanks so much. You’re the best!  No, you are the best, Kate. Thank you so much for asking this marvelous question. What I love about this question? In fact, I believe you said it straight up. Where did you say this? I think I’m afraid to move beyond the outline and into the story. I want to tell you that that is normal. We, many of us feel this way. Some people are just born pantsers and they would never consider an outline, no matter what they’re still doing, they’re still going to end up with good story structure.

[00:02:41] If they end up with a good book, the story structure happens without them making an outline. They’re just able to do that. I’m kind of in the middle. I like a very loose outline of the major plot points. And then I discovery write my way there to flesh out a story. However, I have done really carefully, very well plotted outlines and here’s the thing, no matter what, when you leap into writing the story, no matter how completely you think you have outlined, the story will always take over. Always, always, always, if you talk to the outliner who outlines every scene down to blocking and exactly, who’s going to say what basically they have their whole book written still, the book will jump out of the outline because as we write a story, we learn what the story wants to be. The story, the book is teaching us what it wants to be. And I mean that very literally what I mean by that is that you cannot outline enough. You will never be able to figure out an outline clearly enough and get the inspiration that you need to fill in the outline to perfection. Because you’re not writing the story. 

[00:03:59] Once you’re writing the story, the inspiration comes, the muse when you are actually writing, not outlining, but when you’re actually writing your terrible crappy first draft of any of these scenes, that’s when the muse shows up and that’s when your brain and sometimes the saying, oh, this is so terrible. But if you stick around and you ask that editor’s voice to shut it down for a minute and sit, the editor can sit in the room with you, but the editor can’t touch the keyboard. That’s just for you. That’s just for first drafting and the muse then is able to whisper something in your ear that she never would have given to you. When you were doing the outline, you’re not smart enough. We are- and I’m not talking about you Kate. I’m talking about we as writers. We are not smart enough when we are doing outlines to know what the book really wants to be. So your deep question here is how do you fast draft? How do you do that? For me, it comes, it always comes down to quantity and you can measure one of two, one or two things.

[00:05:04] For a first draft, many writers, I’m going to say almost most writers, I would say that most writers are aiming toward a word count. So if you tell yourself, when you look at your calendar, you figure out how many days you have to write this book and you want it to be done by X date. How many days does that leave you? How long has this book want to be? How much of your already written, how much is left, do some basic math and you find out that, okay, this is a good pace. If I want to be done on November 3rd, whatever your date is, I need to write 1500 words a day on my writing days. Fantastic. What happens is that you have to make yourself just sit down and write 1500 terrible words.

[00:05:45] It does not matter what the words are. Your story will progress. You already have an outline. So you are ahead of many people who want an outline, and this is important: You don’t feel like your outline is done because your outline is not done. And your outline is not going to get done until the book tells you a little bit more about what it wants to be. So you have to pick a word count and head toward it. It usually most people’s word counts are somewhere between 500 words a day and 2000 words a day. I can generally do up to 3000 words a day, although that’s pushing it for me personally, I have done up to 4 and 5,000 words a day on a regular basis. And that wears me down. For me I’m really in the 2000 words a day range. And that’s generally what I tried to do. The story we’ll keep chugging along because you keep showing up and putting words into it. Even if you don’t know what’s going to happen when you stand up and walk away from your computer.

[00:06:43] What I like to do when I’m fast drafting is always make a note of where I am when I stopped for the day. Maybe make a post-it carry it around where you can see it, put it next to the bed and ask yourself as you go to sleep. Okay. You know, she’s at the dump right now, dumping trash, which is what I did earlier today. Took the recycling to the transfer station. She’s at the transfer station. Something has to happen. And then I know she’s going to be in the diner. What’s going to happen between there and just kind of ask your brain that, you don’t have to think too hard about it. Just ask it once and then go to sleep. Your brain is going to be working on it at night. When you sit back down at your computer the next day, that’s when I take usually 5 to 10 minutes to brainstorm out kind of pre-outline my work for the day. Just for the day. 5 minutes maybe I break down what is going to happen in the scene a lot. Most days I have a better idea than I have the day before cause I’m fresh again. And my brain has been working on it overnight. I’ve got a couple ideas. And then I write 1500 words, 2000 words, very, very bad words, but they’re getting me closer and closer to where I want to be. And like clockwork, the muse always shows up and throws another idea at me. 

[00:07:56] And gradually as writers, we all learn to trust this process. I said you can count one or two things. One of two things. You can also count time spent in the writing chair with your hands moving. And what I mean by that is that you will learn over time, we all learn about how many words we write an hour if we are not letting ourselves look at the internet or look at our phones. If I’m sitting with my document, can’t touch anything else already turned out the internet phone is in another room, preferably, I will write about 1400 words an hour. That’s just my rate. I think it’s pretty average. I know plenty of people who write way faster than that. And I know people who write slower than that, that means that if I tie myself to my chair for two hours, I’m going to get 2,800 words. So you can tell right there that when I’m first drafting a book, I’m not even spending two hours a day on it. First drafts exhaust me. They exhaust a lot of people. There’s just so much thinking and deciding and confusion. But if I get 2000 words, if I get 1500 words, a lot of days, I’m happy. That’s, that’s great. I’m done in about an hour. And every day, I’m getting a little bit more information about what I want to do with this book and what I’m talking about the muse I’m not talking about airy fairy and the sky, I’m talking about your brain actually making subconscious connections, that feel like creativity kissing you on the forehead.

[00:09:23] And maybe it is, you know, and amuse. If you’re listening, please don’t let me insult you by saying that you’re not real because you are in a way, but also it’s just us showing up and doing the work so fast drafting, to answer your question, comes down to picking a number of words and starting to do them on a regular daily or almost daily basis. That’s how it gets done, when you were talking about skeletoning. I don’t know if I’ve heard somebody else must have this phrase, but I feel like it’s not my phrase to own, but I can’t remember anybody else ever saying it. So I use it a lot. And what I mean by that is sometimes I will get stuck and I know three scenes down the road. What needs to happen? Or I know 17 scenes down the road. What needs to happen? A lot of times I will allow myself to skeleton and just say, like bullet points of what needs to happen between here and there, between the time she goes from the transfer station and gets onto the boat. She needs to go by the house to pick up the passport, but I don’t know how to write the passport seat.

[00:10:27] So I’ll just say, needs to go to the boat. No, she needs to go to the house to pick up the passport before she gets on the boat. And then I jump into writing the boat scene. So just skeleton, that little part in between that’s draft, that is a crappy first bare bones draft. The thing I love about skeletons, I love this so much, is that when our brains are stuck, and we’re just able to skeleton our way to the next point in the book that we think might work. Maybe it won’t, but it might work a lot of times in revision when we get back to the skeleton, we think, oh, she just had the passport in her purse the whole time. She doesn’t even need to go to the house. No wonder I was stuck. That would have been a wasted scene. She’s got the passport already done check. You don’t need to even write the scene that you skeleton. That happens often with me. I think I must write the scene. Can’t do it, skeleton it. And then I write it later in a sentence or two, if I need to connect some of the scenarios that I need to put on top of these bones. But it comes down to just doing the work, picking a number, an arbitrary number of words that you want to write every time you sit down, pick a goal, date, and then you work toward that. And it feels like you’re going nowhere. It feels like you’re trudging through mud. It feels like you don’t know what you’re doing. And then one day you wake up and the finish line is in sight. And you know that you have screwed up everything in the book.

[00:11:53] And that is okay. That is normal. Number one, you haven’t screwed up everything in the book. That’s just your brain lying to you. There’s a lot of amazing stuff in the book that you will be able to make work in revision. And you’ll be in revision, which is where all the best ideas really start happening. That is when your book starts coming together. So I want to encourage any of you, give yourself if you want to start a book tomorrow, do it. Kate, no, I’m not talking to you. You’ve got a book in mind already, but if somebody else is like, well, I’ve got seven books in mind and I don’t know what to pick. Pick one, figure out an inciting incident that pushes our main character into the story. Think about what’s going to happen to the midpoint, that kind of changes things along the lines of their goals. And think about a dark moment. What’s the very worst part of this book? Those are the three things that I have when I started out.

[00:12:44] And sometimes the dark moment is not very clear. And then I just start, Kate, you mentioned the perfectionism. That is so many writers. That is me. Therefore, when I am writing scenes, I just let myself off the hook. I allow myself to suck, especially those first scenes in a book. For some reason, we get really tied up as writers around. Well, these have got to be good. These have got to catch a reader. These have got to, you know, be hooky. They’ve got to be interesting. No, they, don’t not in first draft. I always tell myself that wherever I start in a book is not going to be the start. So don’t try to make it good. I kind of tell myself that about the whole book, wherever I am in the book, this might not stay. So don’t try to make it good, just get some dialogue down, some action down. Kate, you said that you like to have very full, complete scenes as you move forward, that can be problematic. That is a place where perfectionism can really bite you in the ass. And I bet that you have felt this, the better we make any scene, the more full, and rounded and complete we make any scene. The more we fall in love with it, and the more we marry it and the less we are able to see later that it doesn’t belong in the book. If it’s, I’ve had scenes that not recently, but in my early writing scenes that I loved so much that I would move three or four places in the story, just trying to make them work because I’d written them so well.

[00:14:14] And they were so funny and they were so complete and I could see everything on the page. It was there. It was gorgeous. I had to use these scenes if I had just bare bones them in the first place, you know, written a crappy first draft. When I got back to that scene and thought, oh, this is dumb. This isn’t doing anything it needs to go. I would’ve been able to axe it easily as it was. I wasn’t able to see that these scenes needed to be axed because I’d already fallen in love with them. So what you’re doing by writing a very fast, sloppy, empty, fast draft, where you’ve got a little bit of action, maybe some dialogue, some stuff happening, and then you move to the next scene. You’re allowing yourself later in revision to be able to tell where the real story is and where the real juicy stuff gets to remain and then we build around it. Then we build what needs to be there. It’s almost like we’re building- you often hear writing, talked about like when you’re building a house.

[00:15:17] Yes, I am recording this. I just had a heart-stopping moment that I had just been saying all of this and not recording it, but it was, so you saw my face on the video. That’s what was happening. People talk about building the house, you know, he put up the, the tip beams first and you have to put in the electrical and the plumbing before you hang the drywall. And before you put on the switch plates, before you hang the curtains before you paint the walls. What we do when we write scenes and make them great, make them as awesome as we can, because we are perfectionist. Like so many of us are, is you’re making a room on a plot of land that is connected to nothing and may not ever earn its way to be connected to the house. It’s Justin Wolsey. Now I want it because I’m think it’s just like a gorgeous little tiny home on the property. Let’s keep it like that. But you know what I’m saying? It may never earn its place in this house. So don’t bother hanging the drywall, painting the walls, putting it on the tile until we know that it has to be there.

[00:16:20] So, Kate. I love that you are asking these questions and you were doing this all completely right. And I will say that if you’re at the point that you’re saying, when should I stop outlining and start writing? Oh, the time is now. I think you said you spent weeks on it. The time is now, you can always, oh, this is one thing I do. Let myself do. I do my rough, rough outline and then usually I have an idea of a couple of the next scenes and that’s about it. But when I get stuck, I do my writing for the day, my 1500 words, my 2000 words, whatever it is. And then I can go back to the outline and I can play as much as I want, because I’ve been learning things as I go. And I will say it here and I will always say it. When you come up with new ideas, when you’re writing a first draft of any kind in any place in your first draft, when you come up with new ideas, don’t go back and fix anything. Nothing, because you don’t know if that new idea is really good and if it is going to stick.

[00:17:16] So what I do, you’ve heard me say before, I’ll say it again. I put my new idea on a post-it, so I know that he now has a twin brother and I also write right in the manuscript where I have the idea and where everything changes for me. I write it all in caps. Oh my gosh! He has a twin brother now. And then I write forward in the book as if the Rachael of the past already wrote this book with a twin brother, because I know in revision, I’m going to add the twin brother. Unless I don’t want to. Therefore, I don’t go back and fix anything. We, we try not to ever go back when we are writing this forward first draft, just write your ideas down, pretend that you’ve done them and write forward. It will save you so much time and heartache, and then you’ll get the book done and you’ll write the end. And then you have to make it into what you really, really want it to be, or really what it wants to be and what it’s trying to teach you. But it wants to be so. Kate, thank you for asking such an amazing question that I’m sure helped a ton of people. So thank you for being my patron. I really appreciate you.

[00:18:16] Please send in some more questions, patrons, because I’m out, we don’t have any more. There will not be another mini episode until y’all ask me something. So please do send them in. And I wish all of you very, very, happy and what’s the word? Prolific. That’s the word I’m looking for. Prolific. Please write prolifically and badly so that you can have something to fix later. That’s all you need to do. Okay. Have you writing. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.