How I Write, and My Drafts

Call me old fashioned, but I always like to write an outline of a story out with pencil and paper. That is one thing that I never change in my process, regardless of how or where I am when it strikes. I feel that physically writing the ideas out just help to get the juices flowing. For the Lily Black Saga, I actually write the first two drafts out by hand, off of scribbled down scenes that I have thought up over time that I know I want to include into a particular book. It's very similar to sewing together squares of fabric into a quilt.

The very first draft I focus on mainly getting the entire over arcing idea down on paper, and completing the story. If I cannot finish one draft of a story, then how can I go back and do more drafts of that story? Completion is necessary for me to see that, yes, I can make this into something, and I just need to fill in certain areas, and polish others up. That leads me to the second draft where I go in and add more details, fill out whole scenes, and polish up dialogue.

Once those drafts are written, I then go through and reread everything typically three times. I annotate as I read on where main areas are that still need work, and sometimes add whole scenes (or in one case, a whole chapter) into the margins or on separate sheets of paper that I slide into the notebook at that particular area. Only once that is over, that I then write out a third draft, this one being the first typed one that I do. Once it's all typed up, I reread everything again. It gets tedious, but it is very necessary in order to see if everything flows well together, and that there aren't any major plot holes that are still lingering around.

Once that round is over, then I start to edit. Checking for spelling and grammatical errors (which happen frequently), and making sure that there's enough details within certain harder sections to write. Admittedly, the details part I'm still working on, but it's coming along nicely. I feel that every draft and new novel is improvement in my writing skills, and I look forward to making my writing better and better to be able to tell my stories more fluently for everyone to read.