Will handwriting a first draft really get your work done? Or can you type faster and that’s that? Is handwriting1 a first draft just outright foreign to you now that you hardly even handwrite so much as a shopping list?
Only you can answer these questions but it is possible that you want at least the first one to be a loud “yes” or you wouldn’t be reading this. Other writers (and me) find it easier to get the initial ideas down on paper in longhand. Julia Cameron, author of the breakthrough The Artists Way (of which I have given eight copies away as gifts to friends) wrote in her blog,
“I was once on a panel with four well-known writers. When the issue of using technology came up, we found that each one of us wrote our books by hand in the first draft, even though we all had very nice computers on which we might go faster. We all felt that our first draft seemed “further along” when we worked this way. Right now I am writing a novel, and I am again writing the first draft by hand. Writing by hand, I give my characters time to speak. Writing by hand, I connect securely to what I am creating.”
Is it double work? Writing anything important is probably work doubled, tripled or more as the writing process consists of editing, removing and rewriting. It is simply what writers do.
How can First Draft, essentially a large work book, help you with writing? Ah, this is where the fun begins. The First Draft books have specific areas for every part of the first draft writing process beginning with the notes section for brain-dumping, mind-mapping, and generally getting down what initially comes to mind about your writing project in a non-linear way.
Then there is the outline section (on the facing page from notes in First Draft: 30 x 850 words and just before the free writing section in First Draft: 16,000 words). In the Outline section, noted ideas are succinctly written in three parts (or more, depending on your process). I have written about various outline methods in my blogpost Outlining – a good strategy or counterproductive?.
The nitty gritty of course is the actual freewriting process. This is strategically set out on numbered pages, each page holding more or less 140 words. Again, in my blog post “Freewriting” story, I have written more about who does it and how they do it. By the way, I use “free writing” and ”freewriting” interchangeably.
When writers truly freewrite, trains of thought travel all over the place, so there is plenty of room in margins for scribbling and connecting with other writing – because each page is numbered and so is each line – so you can easily cross-reference or insert bits elsewhere by quoting their page number and line number(s). Of course this looks messy but like the literal birth process, putting life into creations is never neat.
The whole point of free writing: the first part of writing should be free, neatness be damned. Sense can be made of it when editing or entering the work into a word processor.
The writing can be tied together in the best way for each writer, with ordering of each section, paragraph or brilliant one liners in colour if preferred, or with numbers in the margin later so that the initial part of free writing, the purge, can be gotten out without a grammatical care in the world.
Writers can also use the room in the margins of the free writing section for links to material researched online. First Draft does not replace other writing, online etcetera, it supports it beautifully. In First Draft, you have everything you need in front of you with the flick of a page, so that it is easy to see fragments in context, or see the whole, and where different bits should fit.
When it comes time to type the gold that your writer-self has dug from your sub-conscious, it is so much easier to recognise in longhand hardcopy and the typing part of the process should be one of awe at the material you have easily produced. The flow is beautiful, vocabulary selected is appropriate, it almost seems that no time or effort has been spent – your work has become a pleasure to read. The reader is unaware of the scribbles and scratches, lines and circles kept in the privacy of First Draft.
For ease of future writing, there is also an Index at the back of First Draft which writers can alphabeticise if needed, for cross-referencing to other sections of the First Draft book.
So once written and edited, then what?
We are in the age of the behemoth that is Amazon, and Amazon is merely a subset of that much bigger behemoth which is the World Wide Web, where readers of all kinds of predilections are hunting for the very work which you were born to create.
If you have your own little slice of the Internet as a blog, you will find First Draft: 30 x 850 words your go-to for putting ideas on paper. My books are tabbed with post it notes when projects are underway, for easy locating. Words can be duly noted as thoughts strike, my book is always with me. My mind knows I will listen and jot down, so ideas generously give themselves to me at all hours. My book, once I have put the Post-Its in as tabs, will have scratchy pen marks on the notes page, ideas for illustrations will be scribbled, thoughts mind-mapped, links noted as research happens, then outlines will be written and finally pieces are free written. My Contents page is filling up with titles of blog posts completed, ready to be finally entered into my various blogs.
The First Draft: 16,000 words book is for longer works. 16,000 words is the size of a thesis chapter, it can be the size of a film treatment, a novella, or it can be the first section of a 75,000 word novel. I decided to set a limit on a writer’s workbook of 16,000 words for the sake of portability, and also I know that 75,000 words of blank pages for long hand would be far too overwhelming and unwieldy for all but the most experienced of writers. Far better to break the task into 16,000 word chunks, or even easier, 30 chunks of 850 words in First Draft: 30 x 850 words.
I set up a “dummy book” to explain the process for self-publishing on Amazon. This book, First Draft: approx 16,000 words is listed on Amazon, but not available for sale, I discuss why in my blog post about the Amazon self-publishing process. This is not a cautionary tale as such, but I am frank about mistakes I made as a novice, and it outlines the process for publishing (and unpublishing) as an Amazon author.
I trust by now that you can see the benefits of any of my First Draft books for your journey as a writer.
Buy First Draft: 16,000 words
Buy First Draft: 30 x 850 words
I am always delighted to celebrate with other writers who use the First Draft process to create. Please do get in touch, especially if you have any questions. Mail sent electronically to success at write-the-book.com will find me. (No spam please).
Alternatively, longhand mail can be sent to:
Jules, PO Box 19742, Woolston, Christchurch 8062, NEW ZEALAND.
- Read a Guardian article about how mastering penmanship has important cognitive benefits