Terry Pratchett's first draft

For those who aren’t familiar with the name, Terry Pratchett is best known as a fantasy author, and creator of the Discworld series, with the first novel being titled The Colour of Magic, released in 1983.

Well, Mr Pratchett is quoted as having once said “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story,” and from these wise words comes a practice I follow when it comes to completing my own first drafts.

The first draft can be nothing more than a sequence of events to get the author from Chapter One all the way through his story to the all-important The End, only for subsequent drafts to embellish the details between these two points.

Each first draft chapter could literally consist of nothing more than a couple of lines, an overview of what that part of the story will eventually entail, from where it starts, to where it ends, only for the next chapter to similarly take up the reins. 

After the first draft reaches The End, then it’s back to Chapter One, to start preparing the story for its readers, filling in the gaps that now exist, though only on the page, but not in the writer’s head, as well as embellishing all the necessary details to paint the picture as the writer envisages.

Whereas the first draft of a chapter could simply involve a man walking to the local shop, with this line being all that’s required to get the story from the beginning to the end of that chapter, subsequent drafts could then include details about the man, what he’s wearing, his mood, why he’s going to the shop, where he left, who he left behind, as well as everything that he encounters along the way.

The fluid process of storytelling does not allow for all these details to come out in the first draft. If it did, and if the writer attempted to include all this first time round, the process would be hampered to such an extent that by the time the man got to the shop, the writer could very well have forgotten his reason for going there in the first place.