[february 2023] how to write a novel, part 2: drafting

or: how i wrote 500,000 words in 6 months

Feb 03, 2023

hello and happy new year! also, happy 2nd anniversary to the lkwnrl!

january was the longest year of my life. i wrote, with nonfiction included, 153,600 words last month. the good news is, my hands are fine! i’ve been rotating out my keyboards and that’s helping a lot. the bad news is, writing 150k in a month is not particularly conducive to one’s mental health.

and 112k of that is for a new novel that may actually be publishable. fingers crossed 2023 is the year i finally sell a book.

in this issue’s “been thinkin a lot about” section, i’ve laid out my general theory of drafting and the nuts and bolts of my process.

news & announcements

my story “Not If, When” is published at The Write Launch

i can’t tell you how thrilled i am by the reception of this story. it’s very dear to me and i’m so glad it found a good home! also, it was a top 10 finalist in the Launch Pad Prose Competition, and the nice people who run the competition have started pitching it to production studios! very exciting.

here’s a snippet:

I first met Caleb Allen at the twenty-four-hour Kroger where he stocked shelves third shift. He was only twenty-one and had failed out of college the year before because he found it beneath him and told me “the services rendered were not worth the costs incurred.” I was an insomniac, and near nightly went to Kroger at three in the morning to meander among the concentrated fruit juices and cans of condensed soup, under fluorescent lights that tricked me into believing I should be awake anyway. I often found Caleb on his knees, deftly tugging items to the front of the shelf, face-forward, while he sang old blues songs and occasionally broke into bursts of air trumpet. He was the only living thing in a dead place. Over several months we got to know one another, me stuffing roast chicken and Oreos into my basket, him trudging along beside me, telling me fish facts, monologuing about Marxism. He was always chewing gum, snapping it between his teeth, blowing bubbles. I found him annoying and told him so, frequently, yet he was never deterred, probably because I sought him out every time I showed up, pajama-clad and melancholic, begging for a distraction. When one of my tellers quit to tend to her vintage typewriter eBay store full-time, I suggested that Caleb apply for her position.

applications are now open for the Fanauthor Workshop spring session

i’m hosting another Fanauthor Workshop starting April 14! the workshop will meet weekly on Fridays for 5-7 weeks depending on the number of participants.

to read more about the workshop, check out my website.

applications close on March 20. there is no fee to apply.

APPLY

submissions are now open for the 2023 OFIC Press Prize

OFIC Press will be publishing up to two novels and four novellas for our 2024 catalogue. we’re looking for novels >50k words (with a prize of $1000) and novellas 12k-50k words (with a prize of $250). submissions close June 1!

SUBMIT

OFIC Magazine Issue #4 is available for purchase

i can’t tell you how proud and excited i am about this issue! for those subscribed on our Patreon, if you haven’t received your physical copy, you should be getting it soon! for those who aren’t, you can purchase a digital and/or physical copy on our website.

PURCHASE

been thinkin a lot about…

drafting!

it has been exactly a year since i wrote “how to write a novel, part 1.” the reason it took me a year to get to part 2 is because of my 6-month writers’ block, which, when it ended, left me with an entirely new drafting method, and so i had to rethink a lot about my own process. nearly everything in part 1 is stuff i still do; it’s the actual ass-in-chair writing that changed for me.

process, not product

drafting, the act of composing a written work, is usually highly romanticized. for some, it feels like there’s a muse with you, guiding your sentences without you having to think about them too much. for others, they consider this a flow state, being so immersed in something that you are no longer consciously doing it. and some others experience neither of these things, and they draft meticulously and consciously, word by word.

however you feel about the process of writing, the fact remains that it is deeply cognitive.

i have endlessly spouted the praises of the Shitty First Draft. it’s how i approach my own writing and how i teach writing. the basic premise that you have to get a shitty draft down (down draft), clean it up (up draft), and, as Anne Lamott says, “check every tooth” (dental draft). i add an extra draft: signed, sealed, delivered (ssd draft), which means that if it’s fanfic, it’s ready to post, and if it’s original, it’s ready to be read by alpha readers.

in teacher training, i had to read a book called Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, more or less a quintessential composition pedagogy text, which lays out 37 writing concepts. (i was, naturally, buzzing with excitement when i read this book, because it was my introduction not to writing, but to teaching writing.)

granted, this is a composition book which means it’s aimed at teaching freshman college English, but the principles can all be applied to creative writing. the concept that blew my mind was: writing is the process of thought, not the product of thought.

we don’t think and then write, we write to think. we write and speak and compose as the actual process of thought. i wrote about this concept in more detail on my blog.

i think the people who struggle most with drafting are perfectionists. they are driven not just to write a sentence but for that sentence to be good and correct and integral to the work. because perfectionists are usually very intelligent, they are used to their self-perception of their intelligence knowing no bounds. but the smartest person in the world cannot plot, draft, and revise at the same time. i mean, you can try, but it sucks. it’s stressful and hard and no matter how good you think it ends up, a piece can never reach its fullest potential if you only give it one draft.

the very fucked up truth is that you have to make something really bad to make it really good. my students never believe me when i say that you have to write your first draft as badly as you possibly can, and eventually you’ll end up with something great. but if you try to write well, you’ll only end up with something good.

this is true also for style. as an editor, i can’t do anything with dry, competent writing. there’s just nothing there to work with. but bad writing breaks rules, and broken rules make style.

when my students are utterly appalled at the suggestion to do something bad, on purpose, i tell them, isn’t it worth a shot? just one thing. just write one thing intentionally poorly and see what happens when you rewrite it.

setting the ambition

when i’m editing, i consider what i call the ambition of a piece. it’s the foundational tool of good editing. a bad editor will look only at what a piece is, and not what it could be. a good editor will help a piece reach its ambition. a great editor will help you renegotiate a piece’s ambition.

i read a story and i ask myself, what is this story trying to do, and how is it trying to do it? often, i read things and acknowledge that it reaches its ambition, but its ambition is not very high, and that makes it uninteresting. sometimes, a piece’s ambition is too high and the work doesn’t meet it.

it is very, very hard to renegotiate a piece’s ambition once it is fully drafted, because changing its ambition often means a full rewrite into something completely different, a total re-imagining of a project. my first original novel had this problem. i revised it into the best version of the thing that it was. but what it was wasn’t publishable. when i queried agents with it, the feedback i received all involved making it into something else, not into a better version of the thing that it was.

when you set a piece’s ambition too early, it can never be greater than your original inception. i remember rallying against the advice my professors used to give me that i shouldn’t know too much about a work going into it. i wondered, how can i write something if i don’t know what i want to write? but back then, i didn’t understand revision. i wrote one pretty clean draft of a story, submitted it to workshop, and received feedback. then when i went to revise, i changed a few things here and there, moved pieces around, cut stuff, added stuff. i never let my stories breathe. i squeezed them into the tightest spanx of existence—they could stretch, but they remained wholly contained in their thematic and aesthetic intentions.

it wasn’t until i graduated and started coming back to myself as a writer that i really settled in the comfort of not knowing jack shit about what i was writing. i grew to accept the idea i could write a hundred thousand words and throw them all out. who cares? they’re free. they’re infinite. i’m not precious about anything i write. every word has the potential to go into the recycling—not trash, never trash. nothing is thrown away, it’s only repurposed, even if it’s repurposed a year, two years, ten years later. everything can find a new home.

i am not saying you should stare down a blank document and have no idea what you’re about to write. outlining is helpful, pre-writing is helpful. it’s a constant negotiation of what i described in Part 1 and what i’m saying here in Part 2: plan it out, think about it, get ready to write it. but be ready to end up with something you didn’t start with. don’t stay too beholden to your original intentions.

the self-work divide

perhaps you don’t like hearing this. i know i didn’t. in fact it usually angered me, because it meant that i was doing something wrong, and that i wasn’t as good as i thought i was. that i had room to grow. and the idea of having room to grow made me self-conscious of my skills at the time, that i was still a beginner and had no idea what i was doing. so when i heard the tried and true adages of drafting, i dismissed them. that’s not me. i’m different.

the thing about adages is that even when they’re right, we lose sight of what they’re really saying. for those who rail against the shitty first draft, what’s really happening is that you’re tying yourself up in your writing. you’re seeing your work as a reflection of yourself. a story becomes a two-way street: you put yourself in it, and its reception speaks back to you. if it is loved, you are loved. if it is met with apathy, then you are boring. but a story is not a surrogate self. you don’t remove part of yourself and put it in something and then lose that part of you. writing fills; it doesn’t empty.

when self and work become tangled, the shitty first draft becomes a threat to you. if it is bad, you are bad. the trick is to make your work a one-way street. you give your entire self to it, but it can’t come back to touch you. the one-way street isn’t perfect though—you can physically still drive down it, and so things like rejection and mean opinions that target your insecurities will always hurt. but it’ll help you set down the idea of “good” and instead focus on “you.”

you don’t want to make something good. you want to make it as close a representation of your interests and ideals as you possibly can.

the nitty-gritty

alright, that’s a lot of theory stuff. let’s get into the actual mechanics of drafting.

i mentioned that my process changed. a lot of that had to do with, i don’t know, my brain being suddenly rewired. but some of it had to do with the new quality of life tools google docs introduced.

i’ve used every software to draft, and i always come back to google docs, because it’s free, easily accessed, backed up on a cloud, and collaborative. part of my process is writing on a computer and then at night when i go to bed, i reread everything i wrote. so i need it to be accessed on many devices.

some of the QOL changes of gdocs were things that already existed but were more optimized. first, they made a “pageless” view, which i love. second, they improved their navigation tools like headings, so it makes finding stuff in a document really easy. third, they introduced customizable drop-downs.

possibly this is too nitty gritty and specific for anyone to benefit from, but sometimes when i encounter a problem, the solution doesn’t lie in theory, but in “okay, but like what is the physical act of solving this problem? what does my body do to begin?”

especially with novels where there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of words, multiple plot points, dozens of chapters, characters and settings, and so many things to hold onto, at some point the thing becomes unwieldy, and if you don’t have your shit organized it becomes really hard to think about any kind of major revision.

and the sad truth about process is that it affects the quality of the work. with the process i’m using now, i’m making bigger and better things because the organization of it is clicking in my head and it’s easier for me to keep track of things.

so here’s how it goes:

make a folder. title the folder the name of the project. (working title is fine.)
make a document. title the document the name of the project. (working title is fine here too.)
fix the formatting to your liking. i use pageless mode, narrow or medium width; 12pt times new roman font; single-spaced with an extra space after each paragraph break. i also set the heading styles the way i like, which is more or less the way google makes them automatically. headings are very important in my process.
on the left side of the window, i open up the outline view. here’s where you’ll see all your headings.
at the top of the document, i put the title of the project and i use the Title heading so it is very big and it shows up in the outline view.
i will be honest. nearly always i start out thinking i’m writing a short story and it won’t take very long and will not require chapter breaks. so i, in my hubris, often do not put “Chapter 1” next, even though i should. eventually i come back and do that, and when i do, i style it Heading 1 or, if it’s a very long project broken up into parts, i start with Part I (Heading 1) and then Chapter 1 (Heading 2).

the document is set up, and drafting can begin. here are some examples from the thing i’m writing right now.

here’s what the top of the document looks like (there are two titles because i can’t settle on a title for this project). you’ll notice that there are a couple things i didn’t explain:

because for the most part i like my parts and chapters to be the same length, i keep word counts of each chapter by the part heading and the chapter heading. if a part/chapter is significantly longer or shorter than others and it’s not on purpose in some kind of “my mother is a fish” way (an entire chapter of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying), i know there is probably some kind of pacing issue there that will eventually require some revision. for this particular project, instead of “Chapter 1” i’m doing simply “1.” and “2.” and so on because it’s original and that means most of my style choices in this regard will flow through to print.
to the left of the chapter heading is a checkmark and beneath it is a drop-down. they mean the same thing. the checkmark is so i can see the status of a chapter in the outline window, and the drop-down is mostly for a pop of color and also because it feels good to change it from “in progress” to “down draft” to “up draft” and so on. this way, every chapter can be at a different stage of drafting.

here’s what my drop-downs look like:

that’s the big trick with this process: i have four drafts happening simultaneously. personally, i can’t write a whole-ass draft and then go back and rewrite it, unless the story is under 10k or so. what often happens is that i’ll get sick of down drafting, or i’ll get stuck, so i go back up in the document and begin up drafting where i left off. and when sometimes i just want something clean and polished and to focus on the myopic details of style and sentence structure, so i’ll go up farther and dental draft for a while. and sometimes i talk about the project with a friend and want to show them a section, and so i’ll SSD draft.

generally speaking, i need about the first 10-25% of the book to be at the dental draft stage before i know enough about what i’m writing to start hopping around in the document. so let’s skip ahead.

so you’re 25% of the way into the project, and it’s looking clean enough that you could send it to an early reader without being too embarrassed by it. by now i’ve revised my outline significantly and i think, “alright, i know what i’m doing, i know where this is going.” this is yet more hubris. the outline will change drastically about a hundred more times. but that’s the game: you write a little, you fix your outline, write a little more, fix your outline. the major beats are usually fixed, but the path the story takes to get there or the motivations for those things occurring often changes.

for example, in Skinless, i know my narrator Henry, who uses sex as self-harm, is going to end up in the hospital because of an S&M scene going awry. in the early outline of the novel, he has a very bad dom, Thrash, who pushes him too far. in a later outline, after Thrash has become a main character and actually he’s not a bad guy, it’s Henry who does something he shouldn’t during the scene and ends up injuring himself. but by the time i drafted up to that point, none of it made sense, so instead Henry pays some guys to beat the shit out of him.

the hospital is the fixed point because Henry’s next of kin is his father whom he hasn’t seen in 12 years, and the hospital calls his father, and that’s how he enters the story. how Henry gets to the hospital is not so important. what’s important is that i’m holding true to the greater themes, namely that Henry is making his own fate.

with this process, navigation is extremely important. i have to be able to hop around in the document easily, so the outline window is integral. here’s what mine looks like for the project currently:

here, the + means the up draft is complete and the x means the down draft is complete. (the asterisk is specific to this story; it means that’s a POV switch chapter.) what’s most important though is the arrow after chapter 13. the arrow denotes where i left off in a given draft level. i can don’t have to look at where i left off up drafting. i would love to show you what that looks like in the doc itself but that’s a very graphic and upsetting part of the story.

in google docs, the way you make the arrow is two hyphens and a greater-than symbol and it makes it automatically. then you highlight it and turn it into a Heading 3 style.

any part of the story i’ve skipped over or that i need to come back to, i put an arrow in a Heading 3 style so it shows up in the outline panel.

all of this so far is pretty clean as far as my drafting goes. usually there are a lot more arrows and chapters are all at different parts of the process. so let’s look at Part IV, which is a train wreck.

Chapters 20 and 21 are both at the down draft level right now. 22 and 23 are really just some thoughts and dialogue and so they’re not even down drafted, they’re skeleton drafted, which is a draft i like to skip except when i am at the hardest part of a story. a skeleton draft isn’t even a draft. it’s barely a step above outlining. but when you’re in a long project and the shit gets really real, sometimes you just gotta start filling in the remaining boxes however you can.

Chapter 24 doesn’t have a word count beside it because it’s in progress, which means i’ve put a loose description of what happens in that chapter in the title. generally when i start a new part of the story, i’ll go to my outline, break it up into chapters, and then copy it over to the document.

let me elaborate on up drafting:

the up draft is really just “all the pieces are where they need to be.” a dental draft is then “all the pieces are where they need to be *and* it sounds pretty good.” and then the SSD draft is “this is a good representation of my aims of the work.”

a down draft gets the ideas on the page and sometimes you’re pretty on-the-money but sometimes you’re just dead wrong, so the space between down draft and up draft can be pretty huge. i keep probably less than 10% of the down draft. nearly all of it needs to be rewritten except for the occasional sentence or paragraph that sounds kind of cool. the down draft is meant for story discovery only and to figure out what the hell you’re even writing.

to up draft, i go to the down draft of a given chapter, i hit enter a few times, and i rewrite what’s below. as i finish rewriting each scene, i take the down drafted writing and cut and paste it into a different doc, titled “[project title] trash.” this is extremely important, because often i’ll take things out of the trash and put them somewhere else. if i’m killing one of my darlings, in the trash doc i’ll highlight it so that when i have a full draft of the project, i go through and find my darlings to see if there’s anywhere they can go. generally the only time i really mow down the darlings is if it doesn’t make sense in the plot. i don’t believe in killing your darlings just to pare down a scene. if you’re doing that, you can work the scene around the darling. you love what you love for a reason. to be proud of a work, you have to keep the beautiful things you put in it.

even though the down draft is for discovery, sometimes discoveries happen while up drafting that affect previous chapters. instead of immediately fixing it, i’ll go up to the section that the discovery affects and i’ll highlight the text and add a comment telling me to address this in the dental draft.

sometimes a discovery will make a very big thematic change that needs to be addressed at multiple points, in which case at the very bottom of the document i type “punch list” and style it Heading 3, and there i put any major changes or to do list items i need to address once the entire work is up drafted. for example, Henry has C-PTSD. i also have C-PTSD. and now, 100k into this project, i realize i’ve forgotten to pepper his more subtle symptoms in, because to me they’re mundane and unnoteworthy things—flinching, startling, flashbacks, dissociation, and so on—but to people who don’t have C-PTSD, they would seem important in understanding who he is. it’s not something that i can find one particular place for. it’s something that i’ll have to keep in mind for the dental draft and thread in where it seems relevant.

in conclusion!

i gotta say, this method is not particularly satisfying. there’s no point that something feels refreshingly complete, because all of it is happening at once. but it is fast. it’s hard to stall out in a process where there’s always something to do. no idea what happens next in the down draft? click up to where you left off in the up draft. up drafting too much of a leap? click up to where you left off in the dental draft. dental draft not hitting the spot? sign, seal, and deliver a chapter to a friend to read. if they’re enthusiastic enough, it’ll give you motivation to go back to your down draft. and if none of those things are working, go back to your outline and try moving things around, or read through your trash doc and find your darlings, or skip ahead a few chapters and do some skeleton drafting. there is always something to do.

i started this method in june of last year and i’ve written over 500k since then. the downside is that it’s extremely conducive to over-writing. i meant for Skinless to be 25k, max, and i’ll be lucky if i finish it under 125k. i wrote a 45k fic in 8 days with this process. it really works for me, and hopefully it can offer you something to try out for yourself.

if something doesn’t make sense, please feel free to shoot me an ask on tumblr to clarify!

coaching & editing services

it’s 2023 and i’m in my third year as a writing coach. here’s some information about how the coaching process works. i have some upcoming availability for the next several months, so if you’d like to chat, feel free to book an appointment! or, if you have any questions, you can email me at ekweeks@gmail.com.

what i can do:

break out a novel (or fanfic) idea and provide accountability through the writing process until you have a draft ready to send out/post
help with the agent querying or submission process if you’re interested in traditional publishing
provide ongoing developmental (big picture) feedback on your work as well as your overall writing
define and work toward your overall writing goals, in terms of process, craft, and/or publishing
brainstorm solutions and develop revision methods
once a piece is structurally ready, i can offer scene and/or sentence-level edits
help you prepare a writing sample and apply to creative writing MFAs, workshops, residencies, fellowships, and awards
come up with practical, process-based solutions for completing work for those who are neurodivergent or struggle with executive function
help you narrow down a daunting wip list, or develop ideas that you’ve had on the backburner for a while
offer reading recommendations for work in conversation with yours

for real, wherever you’re at in your writing life, i’ll meet you there. i’ve worked with established authors, people just starting out, and writers at all stages in between. to me what’s most important is helping you get on the page exactly the things that are in your brain in a way that you can feel proud of, and coaching you toward your goals as a writer by providing ongoing accountability, feedback, and clear-cut tasks to complete each month.

here’s how it works:

you can just straight-up book a session. you don’t even need to talk to me first (though you can always feel free to email me).
you send me some of your work to read ahead of time (optional).
we get on zoom. i ask you questions about your writing life. you answer them. i take notes. if applicable, i offer feedback on your piece, plus reading recommendations and, if you’re interested in ongoing coaching, an action plan for moving forward with your writing goals.
i shoot you an invoice via paypal after the call. you book another session whenever you’re ready to talk again. most of my clients meet with me monthly, but i can make exceptions to meet more frequently. i also have several clients who only meet with me once or twice a year. (no pressure on frequency. everyone moves at their own pace.)
boom. all your dreams come true*

*might take a while though

i have 1.5 graduate degrees in creative writing pedagogy, and i’ve taught writing at the university level for 6 years. obvs i’m also an avid fangirl with a deep respect not just for fanfiction, but for all creative pursuits. to get a better idea of my writing beliefs, you can scroll through my writing advice tag.

for more of my credentials, feel free to click around my website. you can also check out the testimonials from my clients.