That’s 100% part of the writing process! But, if you’ve got all of these story scraps sitting in your lap, you probably already have a vague idea of which need to happen first, which need to be set up by others, which go together, which are for the ending - that sort of thing. This does not have to be perfect! You might (read: absolutely will) have a change of heart at some point in writing your novel and decide to re-order things. You paste indiscriminately from a bunch of different writing sessions and end up with a document that has a little bit of chapter one, an idea for chapter seven, a conversation that has to happen earlier in the book, three drafts of a potential climax, oh and here’s another bit for the first chapter, don’t forget!! Spend a day (or two, or three!) compiling your notes into chronological order. It can be so easy to have a long document of notes that skips around your story as frenetically as an exhilarated child skips around a playground. Organization! Step Two: Organize those notes into chronological order I highly suggest using Scrivener to sort out your thoughts! You can divide your files into a bajillion different documents if you so desire, but everything is still kept together in a single project. Putting all your notes, drafts, and scene scraps into a single document will benefit you in the long run, even if it seems super overwhelming at first. You will stumble onto scenes you’ve spent the last week painstakingly writing only to find out you had already painstakingly written it. It’s so important to keep your notes in one place. No, you need them all in a single document on your computer. Not on your phone, and on some napkins, and on your laptop, and oh, also on your wall, scrawled in shaky pencil scratchings like an inmate at a prison. You want delicious frozen meatballs to play a role, but you have no idea how to put all these disparate pieces together. You know there’s going to be an alien invasion, for instance, and you know your main character is a twenty-something College grad who toils away at a grocery store all day, stocking shelves. You can see the world they live in as vividly as your own - or, snatches of it, at least. You’ve got a bunch of characters running around, being snarky, in your head. What do I do? Step One for writing your Zero Draft: Stuff all your notes in a single document. I have a story for a novel in my head and I’m not sure how to write it down. So, this post basically answers two questions: What is a Zero Draft? which, in turn, answers the question: It’s the answer to the question: how do I get all of the ideas in my head into something story-shaped? A Zero Draft is and should be the first step to writing a novel. Often, this is because the writer needed a Zero Draft. But, oftentimes, the writer is simply overwhelmed - lost and frustrated and not sure what the story is that they’re telling. Now, why is that? Sometimes, admittedly, stories just don’t work, and the writer loses their motivation to keep clacking away at the keyboard. They’re messy, they’re earnest, and they very, very often go unfinished, as they’re very often abandoned. Now, we’ve all heard of First Drafts: the very first incarnations of the stories we tell. Hello, hello, Happy Writers! Today, we’re talking about Zero Drafts.
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