What is a Zero Draft?

And why do so many writers write them?

‘I hear writers talking about zero drafts. I’m intrigued by the idea but cannot wrap my head around it. What does a zero draft look like?’ said charliemorganwrites over on Threads.

I had to think about it, because I first met zero-drafting in academic writing. The general idea over there is that you collect all your evidence, quotes, sources and ideas onto the page, then move them around until they make a sensible chain of argument - and only then do you start writing actual text to form the first draft.

But how does that translate across into fiction? We aren’t in the business of building an argument, we don’t work with footnoted and referenced evidence, and we don’t (unless we want to be sued for breach of copyright) quote other writers.

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Which is perhaps why the Threads comment trail shows just how diversely we understand the idea - and then there are the writers who (with varying degrees of exasperation) don’t know why we need a new name for first drafts.

But though I don’t, myself, have a Zero Draft stage you could label as that, I think there is a difference between than a First Draft, which it’s useful to think about.

So, drawing together my own ideas and the suggestions in that thread,

A ZERO DRAFT MIGHT BE ANY OF THESE:

• Sketchy evocations of the major scenes - letting the pen help you imagine and Show the most important stages of the physical and psychological story, and minimising or ignoring the Tell-y, linky bits which will eventually be needed between them.

• A Tell-y summary of the key scenes or chapters, without the fleshed-out Showing that will later bring it all alive.

• Dialogue, basic choreography and that’s it, for all the big scenes: in other words, something looking suspiciously like a play-script.

• Bullet points of the main events, actions and reactions/responses in the chain of cause-and-effect that forms the story.

• A ten-or-more page summary, says tammybirdauthor, which is ‘figuring out if you have a story to tell’.

• ‘A super-detailed outline’ is what valeriehewittauthor’s zero drafts consist of.

• A zig-zag tracking of the ‘then-but-therefore-but’ or ‘fortunately-unfortunately’ structure of the story.

• ‘A full sized manuscript’ but with the requirement ‘don’t delete and don’t edit’, says kittrick. This sounds like free-writing a first draft, pretty much, except that occasionally your pen has to stop moving. Similarly, antonyjohnston doesn’t revise, edit, or stop to do more research or refine the prose.

• ‘almost stream of consciousness’ says mmphilpotauthor of their start, though as they go they pause to work more things out.

• a mixture of all these, as emichaelanderson describes: some chapters ‘fully written’ and maybe ‘close to final form’, some ‘just dialogue’, much of it hitched together with bullet-points and blank spaces.

What unites all the possibilities that follow, it seems to me, is that they are all what I would call ‘imagining on paper’: the things which land on the page when you start trying to think ‘with your pen’. What form a zero draft takes for you is probably dictated by which aspects of the final novel arrive earliest, for you, and which you can’t finalise until more of those aspects are solidified. The only things a zero draft is not, I suggest, is a) just a whole bunch of different kinds of planning notes, or b) your first shot at something which is hoping it looks like a final draft.

So a zero draft is trying to represent, in some way, the overall shape and content of the story in your head, as you currently conceive it - but without the pressure of producing what you hope are the right words.

So, having decided what we’re talking about:

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF A ZERO DRAFT?

• calling it a ‘zero draft’ classes it as ‘discovery writing,’ which removes the pressure to make this look as like a final draft as you can manage.

• ‘permission to write messy’, says charliemorgan: permission to let go of over-thinking and editing.

• maintaining momentum is key for emichaelanderson with their ‘mixture’ approach: even if the shape and speed of the ideas arriving changes, you don’t stall because you can just move into a different form

• giving you signposts: your first go at the first draft should be quicker when you only have to write from post to post

• you can road-test and stress-test your premise and plot before you commit to the long slog of writing the whole thing

• you are less tempted to show it to people, because you know it’s not ‘real’ draft, so you don’t get risking getting responses which hamper or daunt you so early in the process.

Clearly, zero drafts are not for every writer - but nor is the whole idea just a new name. There clearly is a stage for many writers which comes later than the thinking-out we call planning, but earlier than the drafting-prose-for-editing.

Would you find it a useful part of your process?