As you may have noticed, even though I blog here about writing and publishing matters, I don’t tend to write much about the actual writing process itself. I don’t share about how many words I get written each day, or my struggles with solving story problems, or my sorting through alternate story titles to find the one I really like.

To be honest, I only very rarely discuss those things with friends either. Until I’ve finished several drafts of a story, it’s almost as if my work doesn’t exist. Even when I’ve workshopped, the manuscripts I share tend to be in as nearly marketable a form as I can make them on my own. I guess I’ve always agreed with Vladimir Nabokov that sharing rough drafts was “like passing around samples of sputum.” Of course, that might be simply because my first drafts tend to be much more raw than those of other writers.

And then there’s also the fact that I’m slightly superstitious about it all, and I’m afraid of jinxing a story. Shedding too much light on on a story before it’s finished might kill it.

But in the interests of opening the window slightly into my writing process, I’m sharing a page from the first draft of a new short story, “Petrified,” which will appear this coming weekend in the program book of the 2008 World Horror Convention. I doubt that you’ll be able to read it anyway, as it’s written by hand, and I’ve always had the world’s worst handwriting.

I do all of my creative work by hand. I write the first draft longhand, then input that draft into the computer. Then I print out the draft and do all of my edits longhand as well, which I’ll then input and print out again. I’ll repeat until done, usually through at least 5-6 heavy rewrites. I think the main reason I write by hand is that I need to see all possibilities in front of me at all times. This is particularly important when it comes to the most intensive work of a story for me, which is the second draft.

Let’s say I’ve written a paragraph and don’t like it much. So I cross out words here and there. I add new sentences and delete others. At the second-draft stage, sometimes every other word is crossed out, and because I’ve run out of white space for insertions, there are yellow stickies hanging off the sides of the page. Doing this by hand, all possible versions are still there in front of me. I can read the original paragraph and all variants at once, and decide which one rings the truest. If I were to edit on a computer, I fear I’d lose that and would be living in an eternal present, and would be unable to glimpse all of these alternatives at once.

I generally destroy all earlier drafts and notes whenever I’m done with a story, so that only the final draft survives, but in this case I’ve decided to post this one page as an offering to the blogosphere. I hope that Vladimir Nabokov, wherever he is, isn’t too displeased with me.