Drafting

The Drafting Process

The drafting process (emphasis on process) is one of the most vital steps of writing, and yet it is all too often overlooked. Ever-present deadlines, combined with a culture of eleventh-hour submissions and due dates as do dates, often result in writers doing the bulk of their writing in one sitting—with some revision but very little change to the substance of their work. These last-minute writing strategies are not only unhealthy, they also tend to yield mediocre work.

A more complicated reason for why so many writers shy away from drafting is embroiled in larger questions and issues about writing and talent. The misguided belief that a select few people are born writers or that they have writing talent thrust upon them causes those who may be struggling with their own writing to bemoan their fate and insist that they just don’t have it. With no possibility for improvement, why bother writing a second draft? This attitude is founded on falsehood, and it is standing in the way of a many potentially great writers.

On the other end of the spectrum, some writers may indeed possess a natural talent or at least some kind of affinity for the written word. If they have gotten along just fine so far by only submitting first drafts, why bother spending any extra time on an assignment?

The truth is, every first draft can be improved. In fact—every draft can be improved, period. Final drafts are merely a healthy stopping point.

Whether you are an accomplished writer or a first-time drafter, writing multiple drafts of the same essay, article, or poem can take your work for mediocre to good and from good to great.

Getting started

Sometimes the hardest part of writing a draft is simply opening the document to start. It feels like once you open Microsoft Word to start putting your first words down, the floodgates of terror and death will overcome you, and you’ll be stuck in your seat for one hundred grueling hours trying to pound out a terrible, horrible, absolutely awful mess of an assignment. Putting it off would be easier than facing that! How can we even dare to get started on this impossible quest?

Below are a few ideas to help conquer the beast that is the drafting process.

Small, Manageable Goals

When dealing with something that feels overwhelming, sometimes you have to start really small—meaning, set a goal to open the document one a day and stare at it for one minute. Or five. But something small, to get a little bit of momentum going. If you track your progress, you’ll find that reaching small goals will give you the skills and confidence to eventually make and reach bigger ones—and, it’ll train you to keep reaching your goals even when you don’t want to.

If you use this tactic, make sure you plan well enough that you’ll have the entire draft finished when it’s due; especially since most teachers probably would find the argument, “I didn’t finish the assignment because that wasn’t my goal,” to be unconvincing.

Time Limits

Sometimes it seems like a writing assignment will take forever and a half to complete. The sheer volume of time we know we should spend on something, compared to what we want to spend, is simply stressful. One way to handle this is to break an assignment down into discrete time blocks—for example, deciding to write the outline in 20 minutes. Or, deciding you’ll only spend 15 minutes a day on the project.

Initially that might seem like too little time, but sometimes know that the ending of the pain and terror of the assignment is within sight can help you actually start.

And, as an added benefit, setting time limits (especially shorter ones, when starting off) helps you to stay more focused on a task, letting you get a lot more done than you initially thought you would.

With enough practice working under time limits, you may find that assignments you initially thought would take extraordinarily long times will begin to take less time—but only if you maintain focus the whole time!

Chunking the Draft

Another more assignment-specific tactic is to divide the draft into chunks, to make tackling it easier.

One method for Research Papers that use IMRAD format might include breaking the writing of the draft into its Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, and working on those independently rather than all at once. If, for example, you have five days to finish the first draft, you could spend one day finishing each part—or, if you’re especially worried about a section that might take more time and effort, you could combine two sections into one day to give you more time to work on that harder section.

The most important principle in that the chunks should be manageable—if they get to be so big that they’re intimidating, you run into the same issue that stopped you from writing the draft in the first place. Don’t feel bad about starting small if it’ll help you get the assignment completed.

Word Count Goals

A final tactic is to set word count goals, which is probably the easiest tactic to measure. It can be a great indicator of overall progress, and probably the most helpful in creating manageable chunks. But beware putting down words simply to reach the goal—word quantity doesn’t always equal word quality.

A typical heuristic you can use to measure word count: in Microsoft Word, one single-spaced page is about 500 words (about 350 for the first page of something using MLA format). One page double-spaced is about 250 words (150 for the first page of something using MLA format). So, if you’re writing a 3-4 page paper (single-spaced) without a heading, you’ll probably be writing between 1,500 and 2,000 words (with a heading, this would probably fall to 1,350 to 1,850).

If you wanted to finish a draft of a 3-page paper (approximately 1,500 words single-spaced) over a period of two days, setting a word count goal of 750 words a day might be appropriate (most people can write between 500 and 750 words in an hour, so planning on at least an hour or an hour and a half to achieve this goal might be an appropriate starting place, until you get more familiar with your own pace).