Vomit Draft

-
Most of the posts here are primarily for me rather than anyone else, but this one is definitely for me. It's a reminder, so I can look back and remember when I first heard the phrase 'vomit draft'.

It was written in a post for one of the Facebook writing groups I'm a part of. Someone has sent the 'vomit draft' of their novel for feedback. I didn't need to ask what that meant, because it's self-evident. It's about just getting it all out. 

Apparently some people are planners, some are pantsers and whichever one you are there's a constant conversation going on about how polished the first draft should be. The most common opinion I'm reading is that getting everything down on paper, getting that first draft completed, should take priority over making sure every plot element fits, every description is relevant and appropriate and every character is behaving in a way that is consistent for them.

So for me that first draft, where the priority is just getting it all out, will in my mind forever be called the vomit draft.

There is no image attached to this post because nobody wants to see the images that Google threw up (pun intended) when I searched the title phrase.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Redrafting Rewind and an Overview of Other Work

-
Image
I'm rewriting Rewind - or redrafting, revising, whatever. I don't know the correct terminology yet and I've no idea if I'm even doing it the right way, but it's working, so in the absence of any better methods, I'm going to stick to what I'm doing. I've got it open in Scrivener and have moved the entire first draft into the notes folder. I have the editing window split, with the first draft of the scene on the right and the new draft on the left. I'm retyping everything. I was concerned about the word count for Rewind, as it topped out at between 40-50,000 words. I can't honestly remember the final count. I've read conflicting views about whether that would constitute a novel, with some websites saying that a novel needs to be at least 50,000 words, in which case Rewind would have been a novella. Other sites, however, say that 40,000 words is the baseline for a novel.  Either way, the rewrite is increasing the word count by around twenty-five...
Read more

Johnny Bananas - Flash Fiction (909 Words)

-
     Whenever someone walks into the club and asks for Johnny, it always reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, Have a Cigar. By the way, which one’s Pink?      The club is called Johnny Bananas and even as I write this it still sounds better to me in an American accent, as if Johnny Bananas was a New York gangster from the fifties. It sounds ridiculous coming out of the mouths of locals, with their broad Norfolk accents. I’d thought more than once about putting a video on TikTok asking people with different accents across the UK to record themselves saying it, just so I could see which was the funniest. I bet that it would be Brummie or Scouse, but I’d like to hear it, just to be sure.      Johnny Bananas isn’t a person. There isn’t even a John on the payroll. The owner is an ex-Para called Rob who opened the club after a mate of his won the lottery. He’s made a point of getting to know all the local veterans and he started the place to give th...
Read more

Predictable

-
Image
I’ve just finished reading a book that was extremely well-written but painfully predictable. I’m not going to name the book or the author, partly out of respect and partly because I don’t want her ripping my work to pieces at a later date. It opened with the discovery of a body, female, of course, abducted, raped, strangled and left in a signature pose by the killer. After a second identical murder victim has a common contact in her phone book, a man is arrested on circumstantial evidence. You’ve probably already guessed that while this man is in custody another victim is found. If I go on to tell you that the investigating officer has a daughter of the same age and at the same college as the other victims, I think you know what else is coming. The investigating officer is taken off the case but, of course, insists on pursuing every lead. Her daughter stops answering her phone at the exact moment the detective realises that one of her daughter's friends is the killer and she ...
Read more