: Re: How rough should a rough draft be For a long time I would edit chapters as I wrote them, to make them as complete as possible. Unfortunately this often resulted in me running out of steam

@Sue2132873

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I used to have a terrible problem with over editing my work. Eventually, I would get frustrated that I was constantly working on beginnings and never got to the "good stuff" in the middle. It eventually led to severe writers block.

After several years, I got a story that was so vivid in my head, I had to get it out. I wasn't thinking about writing a book. I just knew that I had to write out what was going on in my head or else I'd never sleep again. I was thinking about it that much! It was almost as if I weren't trying to write a new story. I was just transcribing a movie that I was watching.

So I just started writing furiously for several hours a day. I was trying to just get the events themselves down before I forgot them or I got bored. Sometimes, I'd write one sentence that represented an entire chapter's worth of story. Instead of my usual style of procrastinating by doing research before I wrote something, I'd write garbage like, "So this big explosion happens and I should do some research to make it realistic. But after all the details, the rest of the story will go like this."

Sometimes I'd write mini scenes that would never get into the story if I tried to publish it. The protagonist wouldn't witness the event, so it wouldn't be part of the narrative. But writing it helped me figure out exactly what the characters around her were thinking at the time and their actions made more sense to me. The supporting characters got stories of their own. They had real personalities and sometimes, I'd have to change parts of the story to make it believable to me that these characters had good reasons for what they were doing.

If I changed my mind about an event or character, I'd add in my new synopsis, but I'd not erase or edit the old event or character, in case I wanted to change back to an older version.

Now I'm well past the middle of my "junk draft" and further along writing a story than I've been before! It's very ugly in this form. I'm not letting anyone read it because it's not at all meant to be read by anyone but me. This is just helping me get the whole story out so I can polish it up and do the real writing later.

There's so much that can happen when you do it this way. I scoffed when people said that their stories took a mind of their own. But writing like this has shown me that it really happens. I had a minor supporting character age himself 40 years younger and made himself the primary villain. And then he refused to be a real villain, but still fought against the protagonist. Now it's very ambiguous about good vs evil. There's even a chance that my protagonist is a villain herself who went down a too dark path to fight for the good cause.

I was used to writing fairly stock plots. I can't believe that my story turned out this complex! I blame ditching the editing and let everything fly wild and free. I'll never go back to the old way. This is great!

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