Invention, Drafting, Revision, or Draftingrevisioninventiondrafting?

Several years ago, I was coming back from a writer’s conference with a friend who was one of the teachers at the conference. Once we got on the straight freeway and had miles to go before another exit or bathroom break, my friend, who is a published novelist and a great writing teacher, said, “Let’s brainstorm about your book.” I had written two drafts of it already and had pitched it to a few editors at the conference. But my friend proceeded to come up, on the spot, with several new possible directions my main character could take.

Though at first I was resistant, his suggestions were great and showed that he understood my main character. I later incorporated several of his ideas. But most important was the way my friend’s comments got me re-energized about my book. I started to see it, not as a finished product, but as a story with fresh possibilities. Though I'd written two drafts, I would go on to write two more.

This anecdote illustrates several things—how writing resembles play, how our work is never really finished, how our work benefits from collaboration. (On that last point, see Diana Glyer’s book Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings). What I am most reminded of, though, is that writing does not progress in stages and really shouldn’t be taught that way. 

Most textbooks still represent writing as happening in five stages: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. This sounds very orderly, and it's probably fine for "school writing." But it doesn’t represent what anyone really does. 

 The “brainstorming” we did coming home from the writers conference is associated with prewriting, the first stage of the writing process. Those lists of ideas and fragments we don’t think of doing after having written two full drafts--which I had done. Where I was, most people think of editing. 

In contrast to many of the textbooks, composition scholars have long talked about writing as recursive. They observe that writing doesn’t happen in neat stages. Instead, writers return again and again throughout their processes to different “stages” even as they try to press forward with their work. This is why I have trouble defining the word “revision.” I can say that it is different from editing. But it also includes all the earlier stages. Revision can lead to reframing, rethinking, sometimes even a new book. 

On the road home from our conference, my friend and I were engaged in some serious recursiveness.

To be honest, my "process" is messy and depends on the specifics of what I'm writing. Sometimes I really do just start writing, going on a scene or an idea. Maybe the “prewriting” or inventing happened in my head for a while. As I write, I make discoveries. When I go back and revise, I often go back to prewriting and new planning. I’ll notice a misspelling and correct it, or remove a pesky intrusive comma between noun phrase and verb. Here's what I call it: draftingrevisinginventingwriting.

I’ve just finished doing that. My first novel is coming out this September. And I have a new idea for a follow up novel, so I am starting this "process" all over again. The new idea came as a scene that I thought was a work of flash fiction—a story of less than 1,000 words in length. But my writing group thought that it didn’t work as flash. They thought I had a much longer work in mind. I wrote down their ideas and realized when I got home that they were right. So my "finished" flash fiction piece is now the first scene in a novel, one that I started writing notes on. This morning, a three act structure and central conflict emerged. 

The ideas happen both as I work and as I am away from it.

“Let’s brainstorm,” my friend said as we drove home from the conference. We had hundreds of miles to drive. I may have thought I was beyond that stage at first, but within another 40 miles, I was thinking differently. I was getting ready to go home and work on my story again.

Again, that story, five years later, is scheduled for release this coming 12th of September.

I’m glad I was willing to go back to the beginning. Writing is messy. Revision, invention, drafting—on that open road, where, exactly, was I? 

Draftinginventingrevisiondrafting. I could use this messy compound to represent the mess I'm talking about and believe I'm inventing a new word. Or, I could just use the old term, writing, and leave it at that. 

Writing, as a cartoon one of my writing teachers had on his office door puts it, is nature's way of telling you that your thinking is sloppy.