Practice Drafts and Sketch Drafts

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

“Practice drafts” are my least favorite thing about writing. It took me years to admit I sometimes need them, and longer still to actually implement them in any useful way, and I don’t use them very often even now. But when I need them, they’re really useful.

First, my definition: a practice draft is one that I not only know isn’t going in the book, it’s one that I’m pretty sure cannot go in the book—it doesn’t fit for some reason. Sometimes, it’s because of the format (writing the next scene as a screenplay, or as a poem, for instance). Other times, it’s because the book has a single viewpoint character, and the practice scene is from someone else’s viewpoint…or several different characters’ viewpoints…or the viewpoint of the chandelier. Or the scene is in first or second person, when the rest of the book is tight third.

In other words, a practice draft means I’m writing words that I start off knowing I am going to throw away. I hate that a lot. However, sometimes it is easier for me to learn a new approach when I know that no one else is ever going to see what I’m doing. It doesn’t have to look good, because it’s never going to be seen in public.

Practice drafts are different from (but closely related to) sketch drafts in my personal lexicon. Sketch drafts are skeletons of scenes that I am intending to appear in the book. I find sketch drafts particularly useful when I’m having trouble juggling all the aspects of a particular scene.

A sketch draft is doing the easy part, and only the easy part. For a lot of scenes, that’s the dialog, but sometimes it’s the choreography or the kind of summary you might find in a letter or history book. It depends on what I already know about the scene I’m sketching. My dialog sketch drafts look like this:

K-What?

D-You don’t have to come. I just thought it would be fun.

K-Mom told you, no skateboards in the Great Hall.

D-Roller skates aren’t skateboards!

At this point, it’s a lot easier to rearrange things to make more sense—cut the first line, then lines 3 and 4, add a comment from K, then finish with line 2—and  then flesh out the scene with body language and description and internal monolog. These are probably the most useful when I hit a sticky scene mid-book, because dialog is usually one of the “easy parts” for me, and it gives me something to start the scene with.

My choreography sketch drafts cover where everyone is and describe where they are and how they move—that is, what happens—but not what they’re saying:

K comes in from the main door, sees D on the other side of the Great Hall, measuring the marble banisters. K hurries forward; D notices her and tries to hide tape measure. Conversation re what he is doing (planning skateboards). K waves arms at marble stairs, floor. D. leaves in a huff.

Again, a really quick diagram of who is where and does what. Sometimes I do a thing like a football play diagram, with circles and arrows if people are changing positions in a scene. And a summary draft looks a lot like a mini-plot-outline:

H and L are in the library, discussing spells. D enters with urgent question about spells (possibly something to do with creating magic skateboards?). L is intrigued; H is, too, but discourages D because he’s adult and has to be Responsible. Three-way discussion follows, getting nowhere until K arrives. D complains that she keeps spoiling his fun.

These are probably the least helpful, because they’re more about what I think is going to happen than things that really happen when I go to write the scene.

A sketch draft gives me something to start from when I’m facing a tricky scene, or one with a zillion characters to keep track of. They’re about things that belong in the book, but that I need to ramp up to, before I actually write the scene.

Practice drafts usually look like a finished scene, except they don’t have to be good enough to put in the book because they’re not going in the book, and I know it. So they can be sloppy and even a bit disconnected. It’s like writing my way into a character, only I’m writing my way into part of the story, or a minor character, or a technique.

The most common practice drafts I do are alternate viewpoints, either using a different type of viewpoint or using a different viewpoint character, or both. Most of my books are single-viewpoint, tight-third-person, so writing an actual scene in first-person as the viewpoint character would count, as would writing the same scene from a minor character’s viewpoint. I’ve occasionally done fully fleshed-out scenes from some other character’s viewpoint that happen “off stage”—things my protagonist/viewpoint character never sees, but is told about. Very occasionally, I do a couple of paragraphs from the viewpoint of the off-stage villain or a villainous minion, just to get a feel for them sooner, or to clarify what actually happened (as compared to what everybody tells my main character happened..

Writing a difficult scene from the viewpoint of an observer—a serving maid or a secretary or somebody in the watching crowd—can be helpful for pinning down the choreography without having to deal with the viewpoint character’s internal reactions at the same time. Writing it from the viewpoint of one of the participants who is not my main viewpoint can be useful for getting a deeper look into that person’s internal reactions (which I still have to figure out how to convey when I write the scene from the protagonist’s viewpoint, but at least I know what they are).

And sometimes, I play around with weird nonlinear techniques that won’t fit in the book the way I’m writing it. Sometimes it’s easier to write a minor character being questioned by the cops (or the villain) about what happened, or a seer misinterpreting it, or a scene where the protagonist comes home drunk to explain events to his/her mother. This gets close to doing a sketch draft, but it lowers the pressure another notch, since the practice draft clearly isn’t going in the story, while parts of the sketch draft are.

The main point of both sketch drafts and practice drafts is to reduce the Internal Editor’s mental pressure on the writer by a) writing just the “easy part” of a scene/chapter, and b) writing stuff that will be useful, but that nobody else will ever see. (I erase mine once I’m sure I won’t need them any more.)