Lies I Tell Myself, Security Blankets, and Backstitch Drafting

Back in May, I wrote a post about my prewriting process- mostly because I wasn’t sure what else to write about that month.

This month, I’m preparing to move houses, and I keep thinking that as someone who has moved many times, and who writes about home and what makes a home and how home changes over time, that I ought to have something poignant and true to say on the subject. But to be honest, every time I think about it, I just end up wondering whether it’d be possible to just light the junk drawer on fire rather than have to figure out what’s in there and what I should do with it.

Possibly I’ll have something deep to contribute once it’s behind me, but not today. So, I’ve determined that this is another good month to talk about my writing process. This month: drafting!

Now, if you read my post in May, you might remember that I am exhaustive pre-writer. I prewrite every beat of every scene before I even begin my draft. So you might imagine that that makes my drafting really fast and smooth.

And in a way, you’d be right! I’ve been known to draft 8 thousand words in a sitting! For those of you not used to measuring words that way, a handy measure is that that would be about 32 pages of double spaced printer paper if I was writing a school essay. I have breached 30 thousand words in a writing-focused weekend.

I draft fast, and I tend to enjoy long periods of that beautiful flow where things come easily and smoothly.

And all of that is genuinely lovely, but also only part of the whole story.

There’s a common wisdom among writers that you should never edit until you’ve finished your first draft. That is, if you realize while writing chapter 5 that you wish you’d done something differently in chapter 2, you write down a note and don’t actually change chapter 2 until you’ve gotten to “The End” on that draft.

It’s sensible advice. It’s easy to get trapped in revising chapter 1 or any other troublesome chapter over and over again and never make any headway. I’ve fallen into that trap myself. But I think craft advice is only as useful as it is adaptable.

I write using something I’ve been calling “backstitch drafting”.

It's based around the 3 act structure most of us in the English speaking world are used to. Act 1 establishes the status quo, breaks the status quo, and gets the plot moving. Act 2 follows the plot through a number of convolutions, and the characters realize that the fix they thought they were pursuing is not the fix they want, and develop a new goal. Act 3 is the climax, the culmination of everything that’s come before. And the falling action is where we get a glimpse into how everything has shaken out as a result of the rest of the book, and maybe get a teaser of what will come next.

It’s not the only method out there, but it’s a reliable old shape most US readers follow seamlessly.

So as you'd expect, I start with drafting Act 1. in Secondhand Origin Stories that was about 5 chapters. I don’t let myself go backwards during that time- only forward scene after scene. But, invariably, by the time I reach the end of act 1 I realize I’ve mangled something about my outline severely.

So at the end of act 1, I’m allowed to go back and meddle with what I’ve written so far. But the critical thing is this- I do not edit to shove my story back into the outline- my exhaustive, extremally long and challenging to make outline.

I go back to incorporate my discoveries. Because 9 times out of 10 the thing that broke my outline is that the actual drafting process gives me a chance to further empathize with the characters in each scene, and really think about how they’re reacting to the things going on around them in light of their backstories, their arcs, and the things they’ve recently experienced. I also do that as much as I can during the outlining process, but things always shift a bit. I’ll decide to tweak how a character conveys something in a way that has emotional resonance but will be received by the other character differently to how I’d outlined it, for example.

It might be less of a problem if I didn’t have such beastly huge casts, but I’ve proven utterly incapable of resisting the siren song of writing a whole sprawling messy community at once. I love community stories too much to prune as hard as I would have to to make this easier. So I go back and edit act 1, and then I go and revise the outlines for Act 2 and 3’s to make room for my discoveries, chase down fun new avenues, and refine character arcs.

Then I draft act 2.

Then, I once again revise both act 1 and act 2.

Edit the outline for act 3.

Draft act 3.

And revise acts 1, 2 and 3.

Usually by then the falling action only needs a few tweaks to be up to the standards of a “first” draft.

So it’s a looping, backstitching, exponentially growing sort of process that looks more or less like this:

I need to do this way because of my memory problems (are you seeing a pattern yet? A LOT of my writing process is just about working around my brain's strengths and weaknesses), and to be as character-oriented as I want to be. If I had to wait till the end of drafting to start editing I would get so confused. I have to be able to quickly and easily check back and see what I’ve written already if I have any hope of staying oriented about what I need to put in next. And if I couldn’t deviate from the outline if the character responses need to shift, I couldn’t write the kind of emotive books that excite me.

But even knowing that all my outlines are lies I'm telling myself, I need them. Figuring out all the tangles than could slow me down ahead of time lets me have that smooth, seamless flow. I don’t think I would like drafting well enough to stick with a novel to the end without that.

So I keep my outlines as a charm- a sort of security blanket that I come back to and play with whenever change gets overwhelming or confusing.

I really love drafting. I miss it sometimes, even though editing has it’s own charms that I’ll write about some other day.

Normally this is where I’d ask you to share any thoughts you have about your creative process- and I’m happy to hear if you do!

But I’m also very open to any tips, tricks or stories you have about moving, because that is my life right now! People always seem to have such good stories about moving. With Thanks, as Always, Lee Brontide Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.

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