In Praise of Zero Drafts

Photo courtesy SXC.

I’ve been told by freelance writers, when I describe to them my approach to writing, that I write like an editor. Perhaps I do.

One time I was comparing notes with one of my writers, and she told me that producing copy is never an issue for her—but she chokes on editing her own work, to the point that she hires an editor friend to polish her work before she submits it for publication. I, on the other hand, typically have to squeeze out my first draft. But once I have something out on paper, I can edit, rearrange and manipulate the content to my heart’s content—even with, or perhaps especially with my own writing, I feel that everything is negotiable once I have a draft to play with.

If you tend to choke on producing early drafts, learning how to write a “zero draft” may be a path out of writer’s block. A zero draft is what you write before you write the rough draft. It’s a no-structure, no-holds-barred, no-one-is-gonna-see-this brain-dump that lets you exorcise the demons (or angels) of this particular story, so you can see what you have and begin structuring your material. It’s the functional equivalent to dumping a box of Legos out on a table to see how many pieces (and what kind) you have before you begin building something.

In their amazing work, “Coaching Writers,” Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry recommend that newsroom editors working with writers who can’t figure out where to begin their stories to write a zero draft in the form of a short note to the editor, describing what information they gathered during their field reporting. The technique gets the focus off wrestling with the structure of the story, and pours it into a format that everyone understands—the personal letter.

For example, “Dear Liz, I went to report at the Democratic National Convention, but got stuck in a five-hour traffic jam. I stepped out of my car and talked to Denver commuters about how the convention is impacting their city. Some people loved it and the money it was bringing in, some people hated how it brought the traffic and city services to a screeching halt, but everyone had an opinion about what a mega-event like this one does to a city the size of Denver. By the time I got to the convention, I felt as if this was the story, and not what was going on at the convention center. Sincerely, A. Writer.”

In just a few sentences, our writer has identified a story line, key points of interest (perhaps useful in the lead or nut graph) and even a bit of a tentative structure (perhaps point-counterpoint, or issue-by-issue debates on the impact of the event?). If he or she had been trying to cook up a great first-person sight-and-sound lead, he/she might have lost track of the other details, or how they would support the flow of the story once their lead anecdote was over.

Another zero draft technique, as I alluded to earlier, is the brain-dump. This could be a list of anecdotes, facts, quotes, descriptions, etc., that you found gripping or which you can’t get out of your head in relation to your story. Do not try to write a lead, a nut graph or transitions that will survive into the rough draft. Just get what you know on paper.

Put your zero draft away long enough to do a load of laundry, mow the yard, drink a beer—whatever—then come back to it. You need time away to let your brain work on the structural part subconsciously. When you’re ready, review your draft, circling repeating patterns, good bits of description or exposition, information that naturally works as a transition, belongs in the lead, etc. You can use your notes on the zero draft to create an outline/mindmap/storyboard for the piece, or you can just refer to it as you do your first real draft—since now have now made your thinking visible, you can sculpt it to serve the needs of your assignment.

Another technique that can get you over the what-to-write hump is known as “scaffolding.” This is useful when you have a pretty good idea what to say but you’re not as sure where to jump into the story. Roy Peter Clark discussed how he used this technique recently to write an article about the late Tim Russert; it’s a great way to acknowledge that your story will change from draft to draft, and to write your way into the story.

Learn More about Zero Drafts

Speed Writing: How to Master the Zero Draft: a good introduction to zero drafting from PeakWriting.com.

Ask the Dissertation Diva: Zero Draft Writing: Another take on zero drafts, from the perspective of academic writing.

List Your Main Ideas in a Zero Draft: This brief article, posted at uliveandlearn.com, shows some ways you can use analog paper-based methods to repurpose your zero draft as a story map or visual outline of your work.

10 reasons to keep a writer’s notebook

Photo courtesy SXC.

I’ve kept a writer’s notebook for about 3.5 years. In that time, I’ve written successful queries, created two new blogs (this one and Creative Liberty) and significantly expanded my writing and editing work. I’m a big advocate of every writer carrying a notebook with them that they write in daily, or nearly daily.

Here are 10 reasons starting a writer’s notebook can charge up your writing work.

1. You can capture ideas before they’re gone. How many times have you had a great idea for an article, film, play, whatever, only to have it slip away before you got it committed to paper?

2. You can record sensory impressions while they are fresh. Often, what separates functional writing from truly great writing is the verisimilitude of the details. With a notebook at hand, you can capture a scene as it unfolds and not worry later if you got the color of the sky, or the color of baggy pants the strange smelly guy on the bus was wearing, right.

3. Writing your ideas down by hand is different than typing them in on your laptop.

4. You can track the development of your ideas from start to finish (even if this takes several notebooks for “big ideas” such as books!).

5. Storage and transport can be easier than computer based methods (I’m still a little leery of taking my laptop on a hike over rocky terrain).

6. Having a notebook handy makes it easier to record brain-dumps and zero drafts–which results in less blocking when it’s time to hit the computer and type a rough draft.

7. You can add mind-maps, storyboards and clippings to your notebook easily, making a neat analog multimedia experience for your story development process (think scrapbooking).

8. You can conduct an impromptu interview or write down all those stray research leads that can get lost if you depend on memory or texting your e-mail or another one-off sort of digital method.

9. Writing daily, in your own handwriting, cultivates an intimacy with your writing voice. You can find, and then fine-tune, your authentic tone.

10. Writer’s notebooks are a great place to experiment with new ideas, approaches, divulge your secret thoughts (at least to yourself) or practice a new technique in a pressure-free, private arena.

Helpful links related to keeping a writer’s notebook:

Daybooks: From the site LiketoWrite.com. A meditation on the value of “daybooks,” a personalized writer’s notebook. The term was coined by the late great journalist and writing coach Don Murray.

1000 Journals and 1001 Journals: A fascinating collaborative journaling project that has made its way around the world and spawned a book and documentary. The websites feature scans and photos of the pages of many of the journals.

Moleskine: The favored brand of notebook for many a writer.

Cool Tools: 3 Fun Ways to Map Your Story Ideas

I read the interview anthology The New New Journalism a couple of years ago, and one of the many things that struck me while reading it was how consistently the writers interviewed for the book said they didn’t use an “outline” when organizing the mass of material to write long-form narrative nonfiction. Just as consistently, immediately after that declaration, the writer would describe how they DID organize the material—which was frequently a list of topics, high points in the material, turning points in their pursuit of the story—and their approach would basically be an outline in everything but name.

That’s what reminded me how much most of us, writers included, hate our 8^th grade English teachers. In the pursuit of teaching us how to write the perfect five-paragraph theme, he or she was often the one who introduced us to the “outline”—that Roman numeral bit of antiquity that works a whole lot better after the piece is finished than while we’re trying to organize it. (I remember learning how to do an outline by studying the structure of finished writings, most often by professional writers, which just seems to buttress my point.)

So outlines are rarely the tool of choice when organizing material, but there are alternatives to a) making a list (and obsessing over it way more than twice) or b) just plunging into writing without structuring the material, which is a little like trying to do a do-it-yourself home improvement project without measuring anything.

I’ve found 3 structuring techniques that go beyond the humble list method, give your writing a visual boost, and can even prepare your finished piece for a world beyond print.

Tool #1: The Mind Map

Popularized by Tony Buzan, mind-mapping has spawned a cottage industry of software that will take your thoughts and provide a visual display of relationships between ideas and where the linkages are. It’s sort of like a 3-D list.

Here’s a link on Tony’s site to a mind-map of a concept from a book by Edward De Bono, Six Thinking Hats.

And here’s a very interesting Flash-based instructional mind-map on how to use mind maps to write an essay.

A related type of mapping is Idea Mapping, based on a book of the same name by Jamie Nast. Her blog has great examples of conceptual maps from a variety of contexts, including maps of books.

The greatest advantage of mind-mapping a nonfiction story is that it makes the whole process less linear, and helps you see multiple relationships between topics and sub-topics in your story. As an editor, I often mind-map as I brainstorm story assignments for my writers; as a writer, it’s been an interesting way to supplement the “list method” of organizing my stories.

Tool #2: Storyboarding

I heard the wonderful journalism instructor Jacqui Banaszynski lecture three years ago at an editor’s conference, and she asserted that the generation coming of age write now has a far more visual, cinematic imagination. She reported that her college students at Mizzou have responded well when she asked them to plot out their nonfiction stories by conceiving each element in a narrative as a “scene.”

Taking that concept one step further is using storyboards to structure one’s writing. Borrowed from the world of filmmaking, storyboards force you to do several things with your writing:

¨ You have to determine a story arc to your material

¨ You have to be explicit about what point of view you are using in your writing, and how and why you shift it during the story

¨ You need to conceive of anecdotes or reportage as scenes, with a beginning, middle and end, that serve to drive the larger story forward

¨ You have to pay attention to the visual and kinesthetic elements of the scenes you are recounting

As one might expect, fiction writers have discovered how useful storyboarding is to their writing. For nonfiction writers, storyboards can help keep a large “cast of characters” organized, reveal gaps in information, uncover points where lesser storylines threaten to derail the main thrust of your article or book, and provide an easy at-a-glance reference for a long manuscript.

This newsletter article from a romance writers group discusses several ways to create a storyboard for a written piece. Lightning Bug’s article on storyboarding is also good, especially because it demonstrates how simple the pictures can be and still be effective. Frankly, spending time creating beautiful graphics isn’t the point—if you can understand what you sketched later, that’s enough!

Tool #3: Wordle/Tag Clouds

One last tool that can help you see patterns in your research is the concept of the tag cloud, which provides a visual representation of the frequency of words or topics in a given piece of writing. Popularized by blogs, tag clouds can be an aid to a user’s search of a site—if a tag that matches their search is big enough, they may be enticed deeper into an online site.

For those of you unfamiliar with tag clouds, here’s one from my delicious.com feed.

Wordle is another interesting tool for finding patterns or repeating elements in your writing. It creates word clouds that look and function much the same as tag clouds.

Here’s an image via Wordle that was created from a newsletter article I wrote a while back about persistence and creativity.

My suggestion for using Wordle to structure your story is to do a free-form brain dump on your material, up to 500 words long, then drop the piece into Wordle and see what patterns emerge.

Write This Way: Writing and Editing Links for August 10, 2008

Another month has begun, and it’s time for another edition of my hyperlink-love-fest! This time, we cover how to overcome freelance feast or famine, a new definition of “enterprise” stories in the online newspaper world, and some helpful links for aspiring writers of creative nonfiction.

First, Bob over at The Writing Journey has written a sensible and interesting post about “The SIMPLE Way to Avoid The Freelance Feast or Famine Cycle”. SIMPLE is Bob’s acronym for Save-Invest-Market-Plan-Live-Experience, and he offers sage advice to newbie freelancers that I wish that I had had when I started over 25 years ago. I was young then (14!), and the financial advice, had it stuck would have definitely helped me get my career off on the right foot!

I particularly like a passage from his advice under “Plan”:

“Dreams require goals, goals require strategies, strategies require tactics, and tactics require individual actions. Many freelance writers can’t get past the tasks of today to establish the goals of tomorrow, so when the lean times hit they’re totally unprepared. Plan your writing business to maximize growth opportunities and to be ready for the lean times.”

If you didn’t read any other part of Bob’s entry, following this tidbit would be enough to set you apart from 90 to 95 percent of all freelancers!

Next, the editor in me loves a recent post by Howard Owens on writers taking ownership of their stories. He takes the concept of “enterprise stories” (stories that reporters originate and advocate for within a publication they work for) and expands it. The theme of his blog is covering trends within the world of online newspapers, and this post is a very good introduction for any writer who publishes online on what he or she needs to do to make sure his or her story finds the audience it is capable of reaching.

Three points he lists in this post are particularly useful and insightful. The last one really highlights the conversational/learning aspect of Web 2.0 writing.

· “When the story is published, you socially bookmark the story as appropriate; you send the link to bloggers you know who might be interested; you e-mail the link to sources or readers you know would be interested.

· After the story is published, you follow and participate as appropriate in the online conversation, either via comments on the story or on other sites (blogs and forums).

· You take everything you’ve learned and repurpose the story for print.”

Finally, for those readers interested in learning more about the creative nonfiction genre, the MFA Blog had a great post and discussion a few days ago about the best MFA writing programs for creative nonfiction writers. I liked both the consideration in the post of which programs have the best “creative community” and which programs have low-residency (low-res) requirements. If you’re seriously considering getting an MFA in creative nonfiction writing, this blog post is a great place to begin your research.

Also, if you’re new to the world of creative nonfiction, or just want to learn more, check out Brevity, an online journal of creative nonfiction writing. It’s published by the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, a 501 c 3 nonprofit formed in 1994 to further this emerging genre. CNF’s site is also packed with interesting news about workshops, publications and influential books in the field.

The Writer’s Bookshelf: Writing Tools and Storycatcher

The end of summer is approaching, and I’ve been using theme “summer reading list” to corral and write reviews of a number of books that are influencing my thinking. As far as writing and editing books go, I’ve been focusing on two books by authors who are already familiar to me: “Writing Tools” by Roy Peter Clark, and “Storycatcher” by Christina Baldwin.

Both are great reads and can improve your writing, by the end of this summer or any time of the year.

“Writing Tools” is written by Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar of the Poynter Institute (a Mecca for working journalists who care about their writing, by the way) and co-author of another of my favorite books, “Coaching Writers: Editors and Writers Working Together Across Media Platforms.” Roy’s always had a wonderful way of explaining writing techniques in a straightforward, cogent manner, and this book is no different.

The subtitle of the book is “50 essential strategies for every writer,” and that is what it delivers: focused instruction on how to improve one’s writing, starting with “micro” issues such as word choice and sentence structure and moving to broader areas such as structure, imagery in writing, and building constructive writing habits.

One of the great strengths of Roy’s approach is that he avoids being pedantic. He notes in his introduction that he is aiming at reaching “a nation of writers,” professional or not, and asserts that the struggle involved in writing that writers moan about is mostly “a con game.”

He says to would-be writers,

“Imagine the act of writing less as a special talent and more as a purposeful craft. Think of writing as carpentry, and this book as your toolbox. You can borrow a writing tool at any time, and here’s another secret: Unlike hammers, chisels and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened and passed along.”

Roy also includes plenty of examples, both from his own writing and the work of others. Each chapter ends with a brief “Workshop” section, with several exercises intended for the reader to try to assimilate the point of the lesson.

Whether you’re just starting out as a writer, or have been around for a long time and need some instruction that really helps you find new places in your craft to refine and master, “Writing Tools” is a dandy book to have on your reference shelf.

If “Writing Tools” focuses on how to write once you have something to say, “Storycatcher” focuses on looking deep within one’s self and finding out what it is you have to say. Christina Baldwin, a pioneer in the personal writing movement, has written a lyrical book about the place of “story” in one’s life, and how to mine personal experience for narratives that can heal, connect, enlighten or challenge.

She makes clear her book’s theme in the first sentences of her introduction:

“Every person is born into life as a blank book—and every person leaves life as a full book…Story is the narrative thread of our experience—not what literally happens, but what we make out of what happens, what we tell each other and what we remember. This narrative determines what we do with the time between the opening of the blank page the day we are born and the closing of the book the day we die.”

Drawing heavily on her own experiences, as well as those of her students and colleagues, Christina covers a wide range of topics in this book, illuminated by chapter subheads such as “why we make story,” “creating a story of the self,” “how story heals family heritage,” “the map of a story-based life” and “how story shapes the spiritual dimensions of our lives.”

“Storycatcher” has helpful end-of-chapter writing and conversation prompts. It’s an excellent reading choice for people wanting write their memoirs or other types of writing grounded in personal experience, as well as for writers probing the underlying themes of their work, which are often grounded in personal story, either explicit or implicit.