The draft

My drafts tell me what I have to say.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer who also wrote nonfiction about everything under the sun, supposedly didn't bother with drafts or revisions. He just sat down and wrote, which is why he was able to churn out so many books. If any editing needed to be done, that's what editors were for. He was always more interested in content than style, so if his writing lacked grace, he didn't care. He had too much to say to worry about how he said it.

Most writers, however, repeatedly revise their work, sometimes right up to publication, and in Walt Whitman's case even after publication. Harper Lee wrote just one novel in her life, To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman, published decades later supposedly as a second Harper Lee novel, was actually just her first draft. She learned from that draft, rewrote it and produced a classic. Publishing her draft was unfair to her.

Roy Peter Clark has much to say about drafts in Murder Your Darlings. His most important point may be simply that first drafts don't have to be any good. It helps simply to get something down on paper (or on a computer screen, as the case may be). Drafts tell him what he has to say, as he puts it. Later he can figure out a better way to say it. 

Drafts help writers spot weaknesses and inconsistencies. Rereading them often leads to new insights, ideas that take the work off in new directions.

Clark quotes Anne Lamott as, in turn, quoting a friend of hers who calls the first draft the "down draft," because you get it down. Then comes the "up draft," because you fix it up. Finally there is the "dental draft," where you check every tooth, which is what I call fine tuning. Later Clark writes about the "zero draft" and even the "subzero draft," referring to what comes before even that first draft — notes, outlines, diagrams, sketches, whatever.

I am wondering, however, whether the very idea of a writing draft may be becoming obsolete, simply because so many writers now work on computers, rather than with typewriters or pen and paper.  Revision still takes place constantly, but without leaving any trace of earlier versions. In the future we may not be able to tell how a Go Set a Watchman became a To Kill a Mockingbird.