AUTHOR’S GAB, READER TALK.
A LETTER TO YOU, THE READER, SO THAT YOU CAN FINALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT I’M THINKING.
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THIS MONTH: Continuing at Step Two: Actually Writing (Drafting and Revising)
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“The pages are blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, in invisible ink, clamoring to become visible.
—Vladimir Nabokov
“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts…. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper…. The first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even God help us, healthy.”
—Author Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.”
― Patricia Fuller, fantasy author
Dear Reader,
It seems only natural to continue my discussion about the writing process this month, especially since one cannot simply start this discussion without finishing it. So, without further ado, I would like to dedicate this month to part two in this series on the writing process. I think there are three basic steps to the writing process: Pre-writing, Drafting and Revising (better known as actually writing something) and Editing and Polishing/Publishing (finishing a piece). This month’s edition will focus on Drafting and Revising, and next month will focus on Editing and Polishing.
Ok, so you’ve done you’re prewriting. You’ve got some ideas and you’re ready to roll. What now???
Congratulations, you’ve entered the actual writing phase, which is formally known as “Drafting and Revising”. It’s basically about cranking out some rough copy based on what you’ve accomplished during your pre-writing process and tweaking it so the reader can understand what you’ve written. So, write something down and, if it doesn’t sound right, change it.
Some people divide the two into separate categories; but, I usually do both as I go, which is why I’m classifying this as one step. Technically, it should be separate, because drafting is about the rawness of what you intend to say and revising is the tweaking of that rawness for the sake of your reader that happens a short time after you finish drafting. There are many resources that go into further detail on these processes, so I’ll just briefly go over my version of each:
- Drafting
- Revising
Think about that~
Sincerely, Your Writer,
Jessica Anne McLean
- Important Note: This month’s Ad Lib is a continuation of last month’s Ad Lib, a series on the writing process. Please see September 2013 for Step One, Prewriting. I have not touched on these issues directly before, so I hope that, over the course of the next few months, you will find this series helpful to your writing and reading.
The Rose 