The main piece below is about drafting, but first another brief update: Over the last two weeks I’ve been seeding a new online notebook with notes from my offline archive. The basic idea is to do a portion of my conceptual work in the open, to make this thinking available to anyone who might be interested, and potentially to generate some useful feedback along the way. To that end, I’ll be gradually growing the notebook over time. Andy Matuschak’s approach is a direct inspiration for this (check that out here), and so far I’ve emulated his model very closely
Some thoughts on drafting
Process is a common theme in conversations with students and friends (mostly musicians, academics, and authors) about writing. Whether the aim is to write a story, an academic paper, a poem, or to make some other sort of compositional artefact, figuring out how to get the thing done seems to be a perpetually interesting topic. I’ve benefited from thinking explicitly about drafting as a cornerstone of creative process, and what follows are a few observations that have had staying power in my own way of doing things.
I suspect that the idea of drafting work doesn’t really mean the same thing that it did a few decades ago. In contrast to a historical emphasis on production of sequential physically separate drafts of work in progress, the editable nature of digital files means that a sequential approach to drafting sometimes gives way to a kind of constant tinkering that lacks the clear milestones built into traditional drafting (draft 1, draft 2, etc.). Digital authorship can benefit from the traditional approach simply by committing to the periodic saving of fresh copies. On the surface, this seems like a trivial point, but taking active steps to draft rather than tinker goes a long way in providing implicit permission to make meaningful changes between drafts. People tend to fret about deleting work (the what-if-I-need-that-thing-I-wrote effect), and this approach seems to do a good job of allaying those fears.
Concretely, these are the steps that I tend to follow in getting from the start of a piece of work through to the finished version:
- Start with draft 0 (call the file something like my_essay_ver0; thanks to Jodie for putting me onto this idea)
- Each time a major change appears on the horizon, a new copy of the work is saved (borrowing from the software development playbook, I add decimal points to the file name, v0.1, v0.2, etc.)
- When a version that holds together from start to finish emerges, this is labelled draft 1—the usual litmus test for ‘holds together’ is that there are no comments or questions embedded in the document, and that it can be read from start to finish
- Show draft 1 to someone for feedback
- From that point onwards, successive drafts are labelled using whole numbers
- After 1–3 iterations of the preceding two points, submit the work for final publication (note that what ‘submit’ means depends on the context—it is the step that gets the thing into the world)
The specific terminology matters less than the underlying premise of the system, which is this: drafting processes have beginnings, middles, and ends, and what matters to the completion of those stages isn’t necessarily the same. At the beginning (for me, between draft 0 and draft 1), the aim of the game is to generate a full draft, mostly regardless of quality. In the middle, between drafts 1 and the final version, the aim is to refine the quality of the work. The main difference between these two phases is the degree of importance accorded analysis and revision of the work—this is much more important in the middle phase than at the beginning.
Anecdotally, I feel there is some agreement in the creative community that composing and editing at the same time (what I’ve called tinkering) is a difficult way to go about composition when the aim is to eventually publish. In digital environments, it is easy to fall into unproductive tinkering, because the tools available seriously reduce the practical distance between creating and editing separate drafts. Accordingly, the backspace key is, in my view, the special enemy of the early creative phase, and should be treated with suspicion. Composing work that will eventually land in front of a potentially critical reader can be confronting, and the backspace key can easily assume the role of a Faustian devil, constantly reminding us that there might be a slightly better way of saying ‘that thing’, though unable to explain quite what said solution might be. Concerns about quality make sense in the bigger picture, but are frequently unhelpful during the initial part of the compositional process. Having a personal theory of drafting is a helpful way to deal with the temptation to tinker, since it can provide separate places for for both unfettered making and for the analytical aspect of revision.