I was a TA in Buffalo and worked for Raymond Federman, the great experimental writer. Somewhere in the years working for him, I absorbed his credo of 12 Drafts of a manuscript before it’s ready for publication.
Draft 1 is a mess. Usually handwritten. I hand write about 80% of my work. This is just the basics. Who, what, where. How, why and when happen in Draft 2.
Draft 2 is How, why and when it happened—-this can also be handwritten. Even a continuation of Draft 1. These two drafts are me trying to capture the lightning thoughts about what this project could be.
Draft 3 is the look of the Digital template. The text, the Font size, the header, the footer, the book itself. Everyone is different in that some books scream from Day one that they probably won’t go over 300 typed pages. Some say they will. So this is where I interject the Business, Design and Marketing of the book. Will the paper be plain white? Ivory stock? Cream colored?
Draft 4 is usually where I start typing, where it makes it to the digital. It’s still a mess. This is just the hard typing of what I have written down. It’s most of the story, maybe 75–90%.
Draft 5—-I’m playing with the cover itself. Sometimes this happens all through Drafts 1–4 where I’m just throwing something together in PowerPoint, Photoshop, searching on an image or two. Sometimes there will be both a Paperback and EBook edition so I have to consider if the same cover will work with production considerations and restrictions or do I have a little wiggle room for a fresh image that was maybe choice # 2.
Draft 6 is generally where I send off for the first edit. It’s rough because I’m going to wait before I tackle what comes back. This will probably lose about 25% of it’s content or get rearranged in the edit/reading.
Draft 7—blends with Draft 6 in that I’m holding a copy, a rough proof copy and I’m trying to “hear” it as a thing that stands on it’s own. As it;s own entity. Sometimes I’ll read something and it will just creak rather than scream. Or I’ll be reading something and it will be impenetrable and I’ll realize the characters aren’t telling me the truth. I have to go sit down, go wait, maybe even go talk to them. One character in a novel, Puzzle, she didn’t tell me she had a second daughter. When she did, when she was unveiled, I understood why she was hidden and why the first one was crazy, what had driven the first one crazy. Then I understood the mother better. But they didn’t all talk to me clearly at first.
Draft 8 is where the characters trust me enough and we all sit down with a pen to that proof copy and go line by line, scene by scene, page by page and agree or disagree as to what is happening, what really happened, what should happen. The characters take a form of spiritual ownership and presence complete in this draft.
Draft 9 is an amalgamation of all of us, me, the characters, the editorial process and it usually is too much, doesn’t make sense, is a cacophony. But everyone’s thoughts are here, everyone has said their bit. Now we have to decide what “works” to tell the story. Usually this falls into whether a scene is relevant and moves the story. Each page must move you to the next. I’m usually reading my own work and others with an eye towards the first 50 pages, will those first pages captivate me as a reader, you as a reader because even if the end, the back end is sensational, those first 50 have to draw you in.
Draft 10 is looking at the balance, the pieces, the climaxes, the denouement , has the point been made, the question answered, the story told, the truth revealed, the lie maintained. Whatever the Purpose, the Destiny of the work is itself, I have to have it by now. Not always do I have it in the beginning but I must feel it, see it, know it now or it’s just pages and folks yakking and walking around.
Draft 11 is the first day of school for my baby. And I drive them to the outside of town and leave them and tell them, I’ve driven you a thousand times up and down this road. Now you must walk this road by yourself, to earn your premiere. That means that I’m just going to read you as a book, I might even wait some time to not have you so fresh in my mind but when I read you—-Final Proof, Final Cover, you must be a book.
Draft 12 has passed that process or we’ve had to go back and forth in editing to get that walking process right, where it reads as a book. Where I’ve sewn up as many flaws as possible. Where I can encapsulate the book in one sentence—-usually I can’t do so until about Draft 9—-which is why I hate this question because I don’t know what the book is about yet. It[‘s about a pound and half, about 400 pages, about wrapped in the color red, about people, folk, doing shit, it’s about the size of a brick, it’s about nothing, it’s about the heaviest densest coaster I own.
Draft 12 is the answer to that question.
That’s what Federman taught me.
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