Draft Zero – Zero Draft

I’ve fallen in love. Despite being married, I have fallen in love all over again.

With outlining.

Not

This
Type
Of


Outlining

I always wanted to be a pantser. I thought it was so cool that someone could write something and it would all just work out. Maybe that seemed so neat because it was so elusive for me. I would start, stop. Restart, stop. Restart again, stop. I would waste days of productivity trying to figure out where my story was going and what scenes were important.

So I decided to outline, my way. Draft Zero.

 

So here is how I went about Zero Drafting, or Draft Zero, Kate point oh.

Start writing. What is the premise that got you started? Write out the idea. Just wring it out of your brain and start adding to it.
Just get the idea down. Hit a part where you need to make a name? Five symbols together %%%%% and you can find-and-replace them later once you take the time to get the name right. Spelled something incorrectly? Keep going
If you have alternating point of views, group your sentences in paragraphs so you can block out the alterations.
It won’t all be uniform in type or depth. Sometimes it’s a broad idea like, “Chase scene.” Other times, I’m drilling down to dialogue because a certain set of words came to mind to link back to a previous scene.
Forget grammar. For some reason, my draft zeros come out as present tense–a tense I never write in for novels. I tried to fix two sentences before I realized I was fighting the process. You’ll know what the verb means no matter what tense it is in. Just get it out.

So, I, Kate Larking, am a reformed pantser. I like structure. Some people claim that outlining takes the magic out of the writing process and takes away all the surprises of writing. But Draft Zero, Zero Drafting, whatever you want to call it, worked for me. It means I can write the full draft before I lose my passion with the story due to frustrations over dead ends.

Does this mean I won’t hit bumps? Absolutely not. I did hit one, actually. And I wrote about it on my personal blog.

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