Just to reveal that I'm completely strange--for me, getting a first draft down is hard, and revision is a joy. I think I knew how to revise as a writer before I knew how to plot. (This meant my failed stories were very polished, making it hard to tell why they failed.)
When you're doing first draft, how much is your internal editor in play? I would have thought -- and it sounds like this is not true in your case -- that multiple-draft-writers would have a very forgiving internal editor the first time round, and a much more critical one the second.
One writer I know used to write first drafts entirely for structural reasons. Period. I'm not even sure they had the dialogue in place at the end of the very long first draft -- but they had the entire structure there, and they could begin to refine structure, seeing what each scene offered, and seeing how to combine two or even three of the scenes into one.
I admired this.
I couldn't do it. My internal editor would not let me get things out in that way, and my structure doesn't lend itself to that approach -- I pull something out and the whole thing falls down -- which is too damn bad, in many ways. I sort of envy that level of of intellectual mapping.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-08-27 08:41 am (UTC)When you're doing first draft, how much is your internal editor in play? I would have thought -- and it sounds like this is not true in your case -- that multiple-draft-writers would have a very forgiving internal editor the first time round, and a much more critical one the second.
One writer I know used to write first drafts entirely for structural reasons. Period. I'm not even sure they had the dialogue in place at the end of the very long first draft -- but they had the entire structure there, and they could begin to refine structure, seeing what each scene offered, and seeing how to combine two or even three of the scenes into one.
I admired this.
I couldn't do it. My internal editor would not let me get things out in that way, and my structure doesn't lend itself to that approach -- I pull something out and the whole thing falls down -- which is too damn bad, in many ways. I sort of envy that level of of intellectual mapping.