Some writers, when attacking their first drafts, condense them, and their stories shrink as they mature, like fruit becoming jam. Other writers have a different method, and for them, first drafts grow like coral reefs. <\/p>\n
I learned along ago that I was one of the latter sort. In fact, over the years, I’ve discovered that my process has very clear parameters.<\/p>\n
Though my editing consists as much of cutting out as of adding in, my second drafts tend to be approximately 50% larger than my first drafts, and the second draft I completed yesterday was no exception. A first draft of 14 pages, or 2,642 words, had been massaged into a second draft of 22 pages, or 4,638 words. <\/p>\n
Other recent short stories had the following leaps in word count from the first to second draft: 2,598 to 4,991; 3,901 to 7,975; 5,236 to 7,515. <\/p>\n
As for subsequent drafts, I usually never end up adding more than a few hundred words to the length as I edit the third draft, and the fourth and further drafts either maintain the same length or are slightly shorter than the third. I realized long ago that’s just the way my brain works, and have noticed very few exceptions to this.<\/p>\n
So—what’s your method? Are you a taker-outer or a putter-inner?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some writers, when attacking their first drafts, condense them, and their stories shrink as they mature, like fruit becoming jam. Other writers have a different method, and for them, first drafts grow like coral reefs. I learned along ago that I was one of the latter sort. In fact, over the years, I’ve discovered that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-12983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-my-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12984,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12983\/revisions\/12984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}