Hi Leigh! You mentioned how you started with a 30K first draft of SoC, then added more in your next drafts. I want to try it with my next WIP and I was wondering how you went about it/ what you included in that first draft. Main scenes, snippets of dialogu

Okay! Let’s talk zero drafts. 

The zero draft is for no one but you. It’s where you get to tell the story to yourself. Infodumps? YES. Trite dialogue? EMBRACE IT. Weird little placeholder notes like “Insert Awesome Scene Here” or “How the hell do they get to the quarry?” BY ALL MEANS. 

When I wrote the zero draft of Six of Crows, I had already written a proposal. It described the plot, the characters, and the world, so I had a good sense of the shape of the story and the kind of story I wanted to tell. (When you sell a book on proposal, it’s not a strictly mechanical thing. That proposal has to have a voice and that can really help you get a handle on the feel you want from the book itself.) In addition to the proposal, I usually work from an outline of twelve beats. If you guys want to know more about that, I can get into it in another post, but that lays out the big moments and turnarounds in the story (prison break! ambush! betrayal! and so on). 

Then I attack the draft. Yes, the SoC draft was written in different POVs and those POVs were determined by that initial outline—I hadn’t assigned them, I just thought, “Okay, I know we need X from this big moment, so who has a lot at stake here? Who can tell us what we need to know?” The process was weirdly organic. I would move from one scene to the next and it was as if each character stepped forward to get his or her two cents in. 

Some scenes/chapters were very short. I’d just write “fight scene” or “moment of catharsis” and move on to the next thing I knew. Others had fully realized descriptions of the Barrel, big chunks of dialogue. 

I definitely diverged from my original outline. The goal is to maintain momentum and find the things that give you pleasure in the story. The zero draft is about discovery. 

From there, each draft got longer as I filled in more of what I knew, tackled the scenes I really didn’t feel like writing, and got a better handle on my characters. This is the way I always work. I write a skeleton and then put meat on its bones. (The exception is my folk tales which I write without an outline, often by telling them to myself in the bathtub. Highly recommended. Use a storyteller voice. Great acoustics.) 

But to be clear: This is what works for me. I know many wonderful authors who work without an outline, or who revise what they write as they go, or who write long and then go back and cut. There is no right way to do this and one of the hardest parts of being a writer is figuring out what your process is. 

I wish you all the luck and please let me know how it goes!