My dark secret is I don't usually have an editor. This isn't best practice. (You should hire or set up a work trade with an editor and listen to them. An editor will absolutely improve your work.) To compensate I have a process for organizing my ideas and writing drafts to catch as many things as I can. It's not a revolutionary new way of writing, it's just the amalgamation of small things that help me start writing and keep writing to get the ideas down and refined.
Here's what I do:
0 Voice recordings
I don't always make recordings, but sometimes while I'm out walking I'll spitball ideas aloud and record it. Hearing concepts spoken aloud is helpful when I'm trying to decide if an idea is something I should continue with or if it's actually just dumb and a dead end. When I'm done with my walk I'll go back through the recording and pick out the good bits.1 Notes
These are the raw ideas that lead to other things. Single words, sentences, chunks of lists in progress, and outlines that get scrawled on the page as they occur to me so I won't forget them later. They go in the little notebook I carry with me and lack any real organization.
2 First draft
The first draft is ugly, too long, and cumbersome in ways I won't notice until later. That's fine. The first draft is where I get words on paper and turn the ideas from my notes into full sentences. At this point it's more important to get the bones of something on the page than it is to be elegant about it.
I write first drafts on any sort of paper in pen and have no qualms about crossing things out or cramming edits between lines and in the margins. Once it's done I let it sit for a few days and ferment, that way I have clear eyes when I come back to edit it for the second draft.
3 Second draft
This is where I start editing. I read the first draft, have tea, then read it again. Then I mark the hell out of it in a different color pen. I try to be as merciless as possible with my editing and usually end up rewriting a significant portion of the draft and cutting out big chunks.
Once I'm satisfied with it I copy the edited version onto fresh loose leaf in pen and let it sit to ferment again before I go back for a third draft. (I specifically use loose leaf because it makes neat stacks. That way it doesn't look like a messy, discouraging pile if I can't get back to writing for a while.) The first draft goes in the recycling.
4 Third draft
I go through the read-tea-read sequence again to catch things I missed in the second draft and the things I decide I'm no longer happy with. Then I copy the new version into a composition notebook in pencil. The notebook is my semi-archival storage. It's durable, compact, and reliable. If my hard drive ever fails or my backups get wonked I'll still have a copy of what I've done that I can type up again and restore. It may not be exactly what the lost final digital draft was, but it's close enough that I can recreate it.
5 "Final" draft
I type up the third draft, usually making a few last changes along the way, and prepare the digital version to be published. The file gets saved as a .txt, copied to a thumb drive, put in cloud storage, and saved onto at least two other devices. Once the text is thoroughly backed up I start prepping it for a blog post, send it off to be included in a zine, or start doing layout. (The 'final' is in scare quotes because there's always some last-minute changes to make before it's actually published, but it's close enough.)
Doing it this way lets me catch most errors and produce the best work I can. There'll always be something I only spot after the PDF is exported or the blog post is published, but as long as it's not in physical print that's fixable.
The key thing is being willing to put in the time and effort to write multiple drafts, let them sit between editing rounds, then step back from what you've done and say "this could be better."
(Seriously though, get an editor.)
These are the raw ideas that lead to other things. Single words, sentences, chunks of lists in progress, and outlines that get scrawled on the page as they occur to me so I won't forget them later. They go in the little notebook I carry with me and lack any real organization.
2 First draft
The first draft is ugly, too long, and cumbersome in ways I won't notice until later. That's fine. The first draft is where I get words on paper and turn the ideas from my notes into full sentences. At this point it's more important to get the bones of something on the page than it is to be elegant about it.
I write first drafts on any sort of paper in pen and have no qualms about crossing things out or cramming edits between lines and in the margins. Once it's done I let it sit for a few days and ferment, that way I have clear eyes when I come back to edit it for the second draft.
3 Second draft
This is where I start editing. I read the first draft, have tea, then read it again. Then I mark the hell out of it in a different color pen. I try to be as merciless as possible with my editing and usually end up rewriting a significant portion of the draft and cutting out big chunks.
Once I'm satisfied with it I copy the edited version onto fresh loose leaf in pen and let it sit to ferment again before I go back for a third draft. (I specifically use loose leaf because it makes neat stacks. That way it doesn't look like a messy, discouraging pile if I can't get back to writing for a while.) The first draft goes in the recycling.
4 Third draft
I go through the read-tea-read sequence again to catch things I missed in the second draft and the things I decide I'm no longer happy with. Then I copy the new version into a composition notebook in pencil. The notebook is my semi-archival storage. It's durable, compact, and reliable. If my hard drive ever fails or my backups get wonked I'll still have a copy of what I've done that I can type up again and restore. It may not be exactly what the lost final digital draft was, but it's close enough that I can recreate it.
5 "Final" draft
I type up the third draft, usually making a few last changes along the way, and prepare the digital version to be published. The file gets saved as a .txt, copied to a thumb drive, put in cloud storage, and saved onto at least two other devices. Once the text is thoroughly backed up I start prepping it for a blog post, send it off to be included in a zine, or start doing layout. (The 'final' is in scare quotes because there's always some last-minute changes to make before it's actually published, but it's close enough.)
Doing it this way lets me catch most errors and produce the best work I can. There'll always be something I only spot after the PDF is exported or the blog post is published, but as long as it's not in physical print that's fixable.
The key thing is being willing to put in the time and effort to write multiple drafts, let them sit between editing rounds, then step back from what you've done and say "this could be better."
(Seriously though, get an editor.)
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