We’ve already written a good deal about what it’s like to get stuck with writing, some strategies for overcoming stuckness, and what unstuck writing tends to feel like. Recently, we also discussed the very important strategy of starting with draft 0 instead of with draft 1 when stuck.
Today we will explore the transition between draft 0 and draft 1. The essence of the transition is that in draft 0 we invite in abundant chaos—the goal is to write without regard for external standards of quality—but now that the initial burst has happened, we have use our judgment to turn our glorious mess into something which will stand up to external scrutiny. There are four pieces of this process.
First, before we begin to write draft 1 we need to sort out what in draft 0 worked and what didn’t. Ideally, after finishing draft 0, you should put it aside for some time so that after coming back to it you should be able to notice which parts still make sense to you and which parts don’t. This is our tweak of a method that composers use to write melodies. For composers, the best measure of whether a melody is any good is whether it gets stuck in the composer’s head; if a melody does this, there’s something there worth developing. The same goes for writing! A good, clear, or compelling idea will quite naturally live inside us and will be recognizable even after we’ve put down the writing. What survives this process of forgetting is what you will develop.
Second, we need to fix the organization of draft 0. As we think through writing, our basic idea might appear (and reappear) anywhere in draft 0. Typically, in draft 0s the key point only emerges towards the end of the writing. This is a natural way to develop an idea, but it’s not a good way to present it to an audience. So typically we find ourselves needing to push the main idea closer to the top.
Third, we typically need to do some sentence-by-sentence cleanup. Chances are good that at least some sentences written during draft 0 are too long, too fragmented, or too garbled to make it into draft 1. This happens because thinking from scratch just is overlong, garbled, and fragmented; in draft 0 we are thinking, and often overthinking; putting down any words at all is already quite an achievement! But in draft 1 some of those words will not pass external scrutiny.
Fourth, we need to clean up paragraphs. This process is guided by the previous three steps. Those steps will tell us what to cut, what to rearrange, what to develop, and what to rewrite. Here you may find yourself going back and forth between organization, sentences, and paragraphs. Just know that not all paragraphs will survive this process.
The transition between draft 0 and draft 1 is sometimes an unhappy one. The feeling of energized inspiration that draft 0 produces now has to face the relatively harsh glare of external standards. We hope that these four steps can help you break down the process into manageable steps.