Fan fiction taught me everything I need to know about writing. (Except this: rewriting, drafts, and

[rsadelle]

ceciliatan says that writing fan fiction teaches you how to do everything except rewrite. hederahelix says she thinks that's dependent upon the writer, which is true to some degree. I think, however, that Cecilia has a great point about the culture of fan fiction. We (I use this term loosely and leave myself out of it) encourage people to post their epics chapter by chapter as they write them. I've always thought this was a bad idea for two reasons: First, for the writer, it means you're stuck with what you have. If you get to chapter 37 and decide that the cat you introduced in chapter 3 needed to be named Alexander instead of Cyrus, tough luck. The cat is now and forevermore named Cyrus. Secondly, for the reader, there's no guarantee that a WiP will ever be finished. How awful is it to get to chapter 87 and then wait and wait and wait in vain for a chapter 88 that never comes? If you're lucky the author will post a note letting you know she's not writing any more of the story so you know not to hope anymore. (You'll notice that I'm making a distinction between WiPs that are posted as they're being written and completed stories that are posted one chapter at a time over a period of days or weeks or months. I dislike those too, but for different reasons.) I can see the counterargument forming in your mind right now: TV shows. Which, yes, true, those go on and on as they're written. You also (usually) get forewarning that they're ending, and you can psych yourself up for it instead of waiting for a story or ending that never comes. For the record, as a general rule, I refuse to read very involved series of books unless the whole series is already published and I can read it all at once. (I say "very involved" because I have no qualms about breaking the rule for fluffy things like the Riley Jensen or Mercy Thompson books.)

Even given how I feel about WiPs and the importance of giving yourself the option to make changes until you're truly ready to post your story, I haven't done that much rewriting in my fan fic career. Polishing, yes, that I've done a lot of. But outright rewriting? Not so much. Probably the closest I've come are the things where I've written more than one version of a beginning, never made a decision what I wanted to do, and never finished the story. (My Mia/Letty with a baby story comes to mind. I think I had three versions of that one going. There's also the original novel where I have two or three versions of the beginning that flow into and repeat each other.) The one I know I rewrote is the train scene in "That Love Thing." The joke that no one but me gets is that I originally wrote the scene from Draco's pov, realized the rest of the story was Harry's pov, and rewrote it. Where Harry loves the woman with the cart, Draco doesn't quite sneer at her. Of course, I couldn't quite resist not sharing that, and I did provide that commentary in an LJ post.

When I took a piece from one of my half-started novels to my writing group, one of the women in my group said something like, "This is a complete scene. In the next draft, start with this and just focus on describing the cabin to us. Then in the next draft, you can add in something else." This was extremely useful rewriting advice that I applied to a different story. I started working my way through football.txt and adding description to the existing scenes and filling in additional scenes so it would have a plot. (I may have already said this before: on first writing, I thought of it as a series of sex scenes with a thin veneer of plot. Upon rereading, I discovered that the veneer was a little too thin, almost to the point of nonexistence.) On the next rewrite, I'll fill in more description on the original scenes, start to fill in description on the new scenes and write in any new new scenes it needs, and so forth and so on.

The Ask: Tracking changes and rewrites.
If you're a rewriter, how do you deal with drafts and versioning? My tendency is to simply save the file with the new changes. Is there any reason I should separate out separate drafts? If so, how many incremental changes add up to a whole new draft? Or should this be like a software version control system where I keep track of all changes all the time?

Comments

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Though I never do it (except for once with my MA thesis), since it's a computer, and we can take advantage of its fanciness, why not save every draft separately? 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc. This way if you change something major that has to do with the plot, you can back and find it again if you decide later to reinsert, rather than having to rewrite it.

Though, of course, having to rewrite it could also prove interesting. This way, though, you could try it both ways.

[rsadelle]

So when do I decide it's a draft? I think that's my biggest question. For this initial add-only set of rewrites, it's pretty clear, but what about the stage where I go through and fidget with a few things, and then a few days later fidget with a few other things? When does that become a new draft? If I change one word in a sentence, does that become draft 2.7.x? (How on earth do software developers deal with this?)

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Since all it costs you is effort, I'd save everything. If you feel you've made a significant change, that's when you go from, say, 1.13 to 1.2, or, if it's significant enough, from 1.13 to 2.0.

The way I do things now, is everything is discarded, in a sense. I have one document, and every time I sit down to write something new, I read everything I've written up to that point, and make changes. I save periodically, and when I'm done, I stop, and the next time, I read through everything again and make changes. If I were to save versions, I'd simply "Save as..." at the end each time and give it some sort of version number--or a date, if you don't have two separate writing sessions in a single day frequently. If you wanted to be maximally effective, you could date and use a version number. Actually, doesn't it date it automatically--the "last modified" date?

Regarding software development, when I'm creating a font, you MUST change the version number each time, or when you load the new version of the font, it will load the old version in the cache, even if you trashed the damn thing and restarted the computer. The font program I use (TypeTool (http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/typetool/)) gives you a "blank.blank" version number. So, my first run-through, the version number is 0.0. The next time I work on the font, if all I've changed is the characters I've already created (fix the kerning, etc.), I increase the version number on the right (e.g., 0.1, 0.4, 0.37 [note: these work differently from decimals. Version 0.4 is not later than version 0.37). If, however, I add a new character (even one character), I move it up a whole number (e.g., 1.0, 2.0, 72.0). Rinse and repeat. I'm sure the same could apply to fiction.

Oh, another character description idea: give each character an animal or an object, and then describe them in terms of that (a car, a shark, a thermometer, etc.). It'll give the English undergraduates something to talk about in their junior seminars.

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Ha! I see I screwed up with my version examples in the first line. I guess that should be 1.13 to 1.14. Oops...

[rsadelle]

See, that's what I do - saving over every time. The first part of the question is really: is there a good argument against that? (Every time I think about it, I think, "If I ever become famous, they'll want to see my early drafts," and then I laugh at myself.)

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Absolute last thing to add (I swear). Again with fonts: When I produce a new version of the font--no matter if it's a small upgrade or a large one--I store the previous working version of the font on a separate drive. This is so that if I screwed up something majorly, I can at least go back to the last version and try to figure out what I did wrong--and use it if I need it right away. This might be a compromise between saving everything and saving over: Save over your last draft, but before you start writing, drag your old draft to another drive--overwriting the last draft you dragged over there, but preserve your most recent draft before the one you're working on.

[rsadelle]

Talk all you want - that's what the internet is for! Hmmm... That's not a bad idea. Complicated by the fact that I don't do regular backups and a second drive for it.

[sandydelaware.livejournal.com]

Hi Ruth :-)

I've experimented with a lot of ways to save changes while I've worked on my dissertation, and manuscripts authored together with other people. Although it's not really the same as writing fiction, I thought I'd share what I've decided worked best for me after a few years of experimentation. What I like to do, rather than number drafts, is to save each day's progress separately. So, at the beginning of a given day that I work on a draft, I'll "save as" with the date, and any changes I make that day will go to that copy. There's been a lot of times where I've wanted to see what I had written in previous drafts, so it's been helpful to me to have those available (this might be different for fiction, but you never know). Saving by date has been easier for me than by number because I sometimes can't remember which version was the last one I worked on (opening draft 6.2 and revising when I have draft 7.1 on a different computer, which is a pain in the butt to fix). Also, it helps me get a sense of how I worked on the document over time and when changes were made. My dissertation was one of the first times I've spent more time revising a manuscript compared to writing the original draft, which has been both interesting and frustrating.

You could also think about using the "track changes" feature. I've found that to be most helpful when I'm working with other people than just for myself, though.

[rsadelle]

Hmm... Saving by date seems doable. Of course, there are times when I've told myself, "Just write one sentence. That's all you have to do," so I'm not sure if the save by date thing would be discouraging or if it would push me to write more. When you were finished with your dissertation or a manuscript, do you then keep all of the along-the-way drafts forever, or do you delete them and keep only the last draft?

I do use track changes a lot at work for editing work. For personal writing, I use Notepad and/or Google Docs. Notepad has no track changes, and I don't have enough of a sense of Google Docs' revision history to be ready to use it.