My Mind Doesn't Do Rough Drafts

I have a confession that will probably annoy every writing teacher I've ever had.

I don't write rough drafts.

I never have.

Technically, that's not true.

I've written plenty of rough drafts.

Sometimes I wrote them after I finished the final draft.

This was a problem in school.

Teachers wanted evidence of a process.

Rough draft.

Revision.

Final draft.

My brain apparently missed that meeting.

I would write a sentence. Read it. Change it. Read it again. Change one word. Move another. Read the paragraph. Decide the rhythm was wrong. Fix it. Research something halfway through because I suddenly needed to know whether the thing I had just written was actually true. Come back. Rewrite the sentence again.

Then, and only then, could we proceed to Sentence Two.

By the time I reached the bottom of the page, I wasn't holding a rough draft.

I had already revised it.

So when school required me to submit the rough draft along with the final paper, I occasionally found myself doing something deeply stupid:

I had to make my finished work worse.

On purpose.

Apparently, this was easier than convincing a teacher that my brain had performed the required steps, just not in the required order.

I wish I could tell you I've matured.

I have not.

I still write this way.

I research while I write. I edit while I write. I rewrite while I write. I fact-check while I write. I can spend twenty minutes making sure one tiny detail is historically accurate before allowing myself to finish the paragraph in which it appears.

Character sketches are another part of the process.

At least, I call them character sketches.

The characters seem to consider them unnecessary paperwork.

I sit down to figure out who someone is while they are already in my head yelling, You know who I am.

Apparently, what I don't always know is their name.

Names are a problem.

I don't choose them casually.

I want the etymology. The origin. The regional accuracy. The historical accuracy. Would someone born in that place, in that year, to that family, plausibly have been given this name?

Sometimes I browse my own family tree looking for one.

High branches. Low branches. Ancient branches. All the way down to the roots.

Somewhere in there is usually a name ripe enough to pick.

I just have to dig or climb.

This is not without risk.

My family tree contains a Shadrack Meshack Abednego Rogers.

One person.

First name. Middle name. Second middle name.

His parents apparently opened the Book of Daniel and decided choosing was for cowards.

And then there's my granduncle Dread Edward Bodie.

Dr. Dread.

If I gave that name to a character, an editor would probably tell me it was too on the nose.

Except Dread wasn't dreadful at all. He was a kind, calm and compassionate doctor.

He went by D.E.

Probably wise.

I haven't used Dread for a character.

Yet.

Although now that I've written this, he's probably going to start talking.

Sometimes I go through all of this, find the right name, research it, make sure it belongs to the right time and place, put it into the manuscript and start writing.

Then, somewhere in the middle of a scene, the character informs me that they hate it.

Fine.

Back to the tree.

Places aren't much easier.

If I'm creating a fictional town or county, I can't just give it a vaguely appropriate name and move on.

Could this place plausibly exist in that state?

What were towns in that region named for? A family? A river? A church? A mill? A railroad? A geographic feature? Who settled there? When? Would the name have existed during the period I'm writing about? Does another county already have it?

If I'm going to invent a place, I want it to feel real enough that someone could type it into a map and be mildly annoyed when they discover it isn't there.

Plausibly existing in that state is, unfortunately, the state I prefer to work in.

All of this happens while I'm writing.

There is no orderly research phase followed by an orderly writing phase followed by an orderly editing phase.

That sounds lovely.

It is not what happens.

My mind has approximately four hundred tabs open at any given time.

The strange thing is that they don't seem to compete with one another.

I can be completely engaged in a conversation with someone while another part of my mind is working through a plot problem.

Another is holding onto a sentence I don't want to lose.

Another is listening to the table beside us.

Sometimes several tables.

I am an unapologetic eavesdropper.

Occupational hazard of writing.

Someone three seats away says something interesting and a tab opens.

That's a line.

Someone else tells a story and another opens.

That's a character.

Meanwhile, the person sitting across from me still has my full attention.

Later, I can often tell you what we talked about, what the people beside us were talking about, the phrase somebody used three tables over, and the plot problem I solved while all of it was happening.

None of this feels particularly remarkable while I'm doing it.

From inside my head, everything simply has a place.

It's only when I try to explain it that I realize what a ridiculous sentence that is.

Apparently, my brain doesn't believe attention should be single occupancy.

My computer tends to look the same way.

Tabs everywhere.

Of course there are.

It's just trying to keep up.

My phone isn't doing any better.

Browser tabs I fully intend to return to. Apps running in the background. Notes containing sentences I couldn't afford to forget. Research I started while standing in line somewhere. Photos of things I need to remember. Multiple conversations happening at once.

Every device I own eventually starts to resemble the inside of my head.

Nothing is ever really closed.

It's just waiting its turn.

I didn't realize quite how this looked from the outside until recently.

I was at work, sitting between flights with another pilot. We had some time to kill, so I was on my phone doing what I do when I don't have my laptop in front of me.

Everything.

I was writing part of a novel. Researching another part of it. Updating my author website. Working on another website. Responding to guests at my vacation rental. Thinking through pricing. Researching what I wanted to do on the overnight.

And, somewhere among all of that, arguing with AI about what I should do when I got there.

Apparently, my face was participating in the argument.

After watching me furiously type for a while, my coworker finally asked:

“Is everything okay?”

I looked up.

“Yeah. Why?”

He said I looked like I was having an argument with someone.

Fair.

“Oh, no. I'm basically just having an argument with myself.”

Then I explained what I was actually doing.

Writing. Researching. Building websites. Working on the vacation rental. Planning the overnight. Cycling through all of them whenever something loaded.

He stared at me.

“You're doing all of that at one time?”

“Yeah.”

To me, this required no further explanation.

To him, apparently, it did.

I explained that I just keep cycling through. If one page takes a few seconds to load, I move to the next task. While that loads, I move to another. Then another. Eventually I come back around.

“That's wild.”

Maybe.

But from inside my head, it doesn't feel wild.

It feels efficient.

The chaos is mostly visible from the outside.

Inside it, I'm in flow.

Once I get there, the rest of the world becomes remarkably easy to forget.

Hunger doesn't get much of a vote.

Neither does sleep.

My bladder has lodged formal complaints.

Hours disappear.

Sometimes the light outside changes before I notice. Sometimes I realize I haven't eaten. Sometimes “one more paragraph” quietly becomes tomorrow.

It isn't that I can't stop.

It's that stopping doesn't occur to me.

There is one place where all of this computing power seems to have been diverted away from, though.

Graphics.

My friends with mental imagery seem to have gotten the premium package.

Full graphics processor. 4K display. Beautifully rendered internal worlds.

I'm a little jealous.

My brain appears to be running an early version of Windows.

I have graphics, technically.

Mostly colored pages and a basic layout.

No pictures.

But I got unlimited tabs.

And Word.

I don't see the worlds I'm writing.

Words are how I render them.

Strangely, sleep is different.

I dream visually. Vividly.

Sometimes I'm myself.

Sometimes I'm not.

I've done that for as long as I can remember. It used to freak my mom out a little because she didn't know anyone else who dreamed from other people's perspectives or remained so aware of what was happening while they were dreaming.

Sometimes I know I'm dreaming.

Sometimes I know I'm not me.

I'll find a mirror.

Different face.

Different person.

Fine.

I keep going.

I don't want to wake myself up. I want to see where this goes.

For a while, I get to inhabit another perspective. I can pay attention to what this person notices, what they feel, how they move through the world.

It's character study without the character sketch.

Apparently, the characters were right.

Sometimes, without interrupting the dream, I'll make a mental note:

Remember this.

Remember the place. Remember what happened. Remember how this felt.

I didn't learn that I had aphantasia until I was thirty-five.

Afterward, some of this started making more sense to me. Dreams were the one place where I experienced the kind of visual imagery other people described having while awake.

Then I wake up.

Poof.

The picture is gone.

Occasionally there's something like a ghost image if I reach for it quickly enough. Mostly, though, the visual disappears almost immediately.

But the information doesn't.

The place. The person. The conversation. The feeling. The story.

Those remain.

The graphics shut down.

Everything renders to Word.

So I reach for my phone.

I have woken from a dead sleep, typed an idea into my Notes app, put the phone down and gone straight back to sleep.

Closing the computer doesn't close the tabs.

Putting down the phone doesn't close them either.

Apparently, neither does unconsciousness.

There is almost always something running in the background.

Which may explain why generating material has never been my problem.

My problem comes later.

I am terrible at cutting.

I like words.

This is useful when your chosen occupation involves arranging them.

It becomes considerably less useful when someone suggests you use fewer of them.

I am verbose.

I know this.

I can rewrite the same sentence fifteen times without hesitation. I will change the structure, replace a word, move a comma, rearrange the rhythm and happily kill every version that isn't doing exactly what I want.

But ask me to cut an entire paragraph I spent hours researching, constructing and polishing?

Now we have a problem.

Because I know things about that paragraph.

I know where the surname came from.

I know why the town has that name.

I know what year the building was constructed and what kind of wood they would have used and whether the flowers blooming outside the window would actually have been blooming in May.

I did the research.

I made the words behave.

And now you want me to delete them?

This is probably why the conventional wisdom about rough drafts exists.

A rough draft gives you permission to make something imperfect.

My brain has never been particularly interested in that permission.

I cannot easily leave a sentence behind with the promise that I'll fix it later.

Later?

It's right there.

I can fix it now.

So I do.

This process has advantages. By the time I've written something, I've usually already researched, rewritten and edited it repeatedly.

It also has disadvantages.

Perfectionism can masquerade as productivity remarkably well.

Sometimes the sentence really does need another pass.

Sometimes I am rearranging furniture in a room that was already perfectly livable because I don't want to walk into the unfinished room next door.

I'm learning the difference.

I'm also learning that finishing a book requires a slightly different discipline than writing one.

At some point, the sentence has to be allowed to exist.

The paragraph has to stay.

The character has to keep the name.

The research tab has to close.

The story has to move forward.

Teachers used to make me turn in my rough drafts.

Sometimes I had to write them after I'd finished the paper.

Decades later, I suppose I still haven't learned.

I research while I write.

I edit while I write.

I rewrite while I write.

I just don't rough draft while I write.

Maybe someday I'll learn.

Right after I close some of these tabs.