Where to Start? Idea Building & the Zero Draft

Feb 17, 2023

Where to start? To serialize the novel or memoir you’re meant to write, you must go through the entire writing process with each installment.

Here’s how I break it down. This may seem familiar, but it’s a different way of approaching it:

Stage 1: Idea Building
Stage 2: The Zero Draft
Stage 3: Revising (for content)
Stage 4: Editing (for style)
Stage 5: Proofreading (your best friend)

I want to give you evidence that the writing process I’m about to share produces results—if that’s what you’re after. I wrote a memoir, landed a powerhouse agent, and got a generous book deal with a major publishing house in under seven months. Seven months.

Granted, I’d been writing for twenty years, and it wasn’t my first book (several very bad novels remain hidden). But when I was doing publicity for my memoir and people asked me about how it came into being, I realized it had everything to do with the writing process I’d cultivated over those two decades. I’d learned to write smarter, better, faster, and with less self-loathing. I want to share it with you.

Of course, every writer is different. You may be working just fine in terms of approach, results, and speed. But I think we can all use help reining in the self-loathing that writers are so good at generating. This isn’t the “right” way, just one way. Pick and choose from these ideas and methods to perfect your own writing process.

Stage 1: Idea Building

For each installment, the Idea Building or brainstorming stage should last no longer than one hour. If it includes research, which I don’t recommend because research is perhaps the most delicious form of procrastination ever invented, keep that research to fifteen minutes.

Joyce Carol Oates comes up with ideas while on her runs. (I mention her a lot because she’s a good study for anyone developing their writing process. This three-minute New Yorker video of her life shows how powerful it is to love to write rather than complain about or dread it. Favorite quote: “I have no idea how many books that I’ve sold or how many books that I’ve written. I could look these things up; I have no interest in it.” Love that. Just write for the love of it.)

I’m not a runner (too hard on the body), but I walk (a lot). I must not have Oates’s steel-trap mind because if I simply walk and muse, by the time I get home, I can’t remember what I was thinking. So I record my ideas on Voice Memos and upload them to Descript, a transcription platform that actually produces an accurate transcription. (Descript has a free option. The platform is also for podcasting and other things I haven’t explored.)

Note: Using dictation on Notes and/or Google Docs is ill-advised. They produce gobbledygook. Using these apps is frustrating in the extreme and will actually hurt your brain.

If you prefer pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, open your mind by changing up your usual way of doing things:

Sit on the floor and write (or draw) on butcher-block paper.
Write in a different color pen. (Though be wary of red, which can bring back memories of being graded in school.)
If you like to work on the computer, do so in a font (and color) you don’t normally use. (I also recommend focus mode.)
Go somewhere you don’t usually write. (For all you coffee-shop die-hards out there, don’t read the rest of this bullet point.) Caveat: Coffee shops are death to writing—not recommended. I don’t know of a single professional writer who finished a full-length work in a cafe. That said, some people write very well there. )

Stage 2: The Zero Draft

Some call this simply “drafting,” but there’s more to it than that. I got the term zero draft from someone and wish I could remember who (credit where credit is due), but I can’t. My version of the Zero Draft is key.

We’re mistaken when we think that brainstorming, research, note-taking, and writing through an idea produce a first draft or any draft; they produce the Zero Draft.

The Zero Draft can’t be any good. It’s not supposed to be.

You should write the Zero Draft quickly. For those of you who are constant revisers (i.e., perfectionists) and can spend days on the opening paragraph, keep yourself moving. Anne Lamott calls this vomiting on the page, but don’t degrade yourself like that. If you need a benchmark to quiet your inner critic, go for B-minus work. Not A, not A-plus, not terrible—just done.

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