Do you draft before you draft?

[u/jemmly]

Hi all!!

I'm getting into writing a new novel idea and wanted to see where everyone stands with drafting. For my first book I wrote almost entirely by the seat of my pants but it took 4 years before I finishes that book and that doesn't even including the editing stages.

I'm thinking of trying trying draft a bit more this time around to save my brain from falling into circles trying to chase my plot. I feel like there's a line with having too much detail for your 1st draft and absolutely too little detail.

How much do you draft before your first draft, or do you skip it entirely? Just getting a feel for how others do their processes!

[u/East-Party-8316]

I start writing very chaotically, I’ll just sh*t out a bunch of ideas/characters I like onto a Google Doc until I run out of ideas, then I’ll pick a starting point and an ending point for the story. From there, I start a chart that goes chapter by chapter with what details/action/dialogue I generally want to occur in each chapter until I have a rough outline. Then, I have another page I call “Questions to be Answered” where I’ll look through my outline and figure out what doesn’t make sense and what questions needs to be answered (Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?). Once I have the big ideas I’ll just start writing and go back and forth between the template/draft making tweaks and adding things in as I go.