The POS

Nora Roberts calls hers the POS — pile of shit. Jennifer Crusie calls her own the "Don't Look Down" draft. I'm trying to decide what to call my first draft.

I edit as I write — yes, yes, I know, some people say that stifles their creativity, but I'm already a left-brained writer.  I plan out every scene and all of the major characters and their arcs meticulously before I even start writing the first page. And I need to read what I wrote the day before, fix it and only then can I move on. Sometimes I even edit the same day — for example, the other day I spent my morning writing, took a break for lunch and came back and read what I'd written. Damn good thing I did too — it was horrible. No, really, I mean just God-awful. A quick delete and I started again from scratch, this time doing it right — really getting in to my character's head and putting myself there in the situation before I even started writing. I call this my pre-writing.

So if I'm doing all this pre-writing, writing and then my initial editing, it means that when I'm finally finished that first draft, it's in pretty good shape. Oh no, that does not mean that I don't have to then reread the whole thing, making drastic changes as I go through. Too often my work is too short and I've got to find another subplot or figure out how I'm going to expand what I've already written. And there is always plenty to be fixed, from word choice to grammar to backloading my sentences and paragraphs.

But what do I call this first draft? It's more than a POS and I do look down as I write. Maybe it's a tiptoe draft — I'm tiptoeing through my story. Living it, editing it, working on it, and creating it all as I write that first draft.

So, what do you call your first draft and how do you look at it? Is it a work in progress that needs a lot of fixing once it's done? Or is it pretty close to what the final manuscript will look like?