What Do You Write After You Finish Your Flow Draft?
You’ve finished your flow draft. Now what?
In this post I share the first thing to do with your draft, and the one thing not to do yet, while always keeping in mind three core principles I learned in art school: work from large to small, cycle throughout the whole piece evenly, and make relationships.
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You've finished your Flow Draft - but now what?
You've finished what I call your flow draft. You have 20 to 30 pages of flow writing, having taken dictation from your mind. You've put it all on the page. Congratulations!
You've opened the file, you look at it, and you think, "Now what?" You've heard it a 100 times, writing is rewriting, but nobody tells you what to rewrite: characters, scenes, sentences? So you start on page one and fiddle around, and a week later, you're still on chapter one.
By the end of this post, you'll know the first thing to do with your draft and the one thing not to do with it yet.
What I Pay Attention To As a Book Doctor
Hi, I'm Dr. Gwyn Erwin, and welcome back to my channel, Healing For Your Life. I've been a psychoanalyst in private practice for over 30 years, and I've been a professional writer since I was 14, a book doctor, editor, ghostwriter, writing coach, and a teacher of writing on the graduate and undergraduate levels.
I pay attention to two things at once: what's happening on the page and what's happening inside you, the writer.
Here's what I've seen over and over again: Most writers, even excellent published writers, are feeling their way through revisions. They read a draft, notice what bothers them, and then they start rewriting wherever they happen to be.
Larry Gluck's Philosophy: 3 Principles in Working With Art
The trouble isn't talent, the trouble is that no one has given them an order to work with.
Years ago, I spent five years in art school with a wonderful artist named Larry Gluck, who founded Mission Renaissance. He taught every student three principles in working with art, and I have used them in my writing and in my life ever since.
The first is from working from large to small. If you want to redo your bedroom, you don't start with one drawer. You'd finish it and see no difference. You start with the biggest change that will have the biggest effect.
The second principle is cycle throughout the whole project evenly. Think of a photographer who's working in a dark room and developing a photo in the dark room tray. The image doesn't come up one corner at a time. The whole picture rises together. It's the same in painting. You don't paint one perfect flower and then try to build the rest of the painting around it. And the same principle works in writing. Once you've written one perfect chapter, getting everything else to match is exhausting and usually defeating.
The third principle is to make relationships. In a painting, you notice how the curve of an orange leads your eye into the edge of the bowl and down into the shadow. In a book, it's how your theme folds into your scenes and how each chapter connects to the next. Relationships keep you from wandering off on tangents.
What Not To Do With You Draft - Yet
Here's the thing not to do yet:
Don't polish your sentences.
Don't fix the grammar.
Don't perfect chapter one or even a sentence.
That's how most of us were taught in school.
Write it once, correct it, hand it in, hope for an A. But sentence level work is small work. If you do it now, you'll polish paragraphs that may not even survive the next draft, and you'll be pulling yourself out of your essential creative state, which is hard enough to get into as it is.
So creativity rules the day and comes first.
The mechanics are way down the list, coming last.
All right, so you've written a flow draft.
Let the draft rest. I call this gestation, having been a mother several times.
Your mind will keep working on the book even when you're not at your desk. That's why ideas come in the shower or when you're driving on the freeway, or at 3:00 in the morning, which is when I get a lot of them. So keep a notepad handy and catch them like butterflies in a net.
Then when you've had a little distance, but before the draft goes cold on you, read the whole thing through in one sitting, if possible, and keep a pad of paper next to you. We're going to be using the above three principles, working from large to small, cycling throughout the entire project and making relationships in every draft while we focus on the each draft itself and its purpose.
In The Next Draft (After Your Flow Draft)
In the next draft, after your flow draft, look for only one thing, the large things that are missing.
Not small things, not a better word or a missing detail. Large holes.
I like to picture your draft as a pond, and the read-through is like finding your ducks. It's playful on purpose. You're reading along and suddenly, oh my goodness, I never wrote the scene where she decides to leave, or in nonfiction, this whole argument needs a chapter on the other side of the question.
Jot down a few words on your pad so you'll remember. Don't write it yet. Keep reading.
You're going to finish the entire read-through. Then you go back to your document, and in this next writing draft, you're going to write in those large holes. You fill them in throughout the book, not just at the beginning.
That's principle two, and fill them in the same free associative way you wrote your flow draft. Not carefully, not critically, just get the material on the page. You may do this more than once. You may need to. There's no magic number of drafts. The point is that this type of draft, filling in the large holes, has one job, and now you know what it is.
One more thing...
When you start filling in large holes, your draft may get messier for a while. Transitions may get obscured. The writing may get a little awkward. That's normal. Try not to worry about it. That is what building a book from the inside out looks like. So fill in the large holes evenly throughout the entire manuscript, making relationships.
If this was helpful, I've put a freebie together for you. You can get it here.
If you're a writer who wants the entire sequence of drafting, every kind of draft from idea to finished manuscript ready for publication, I have a new course for you:
Drafting Your Writing To Publication: A draft-by-draft guide to taking your writing from first flow to a publishable manuscript.
Until next time, happy writing. Bye for now.
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