Not on my watch. Not in my files. I know I’ve heard the suggestion/advice that it is more important to finish the full draft than worry about it being a good draft. Fine. I can agree with that to an extent. It is impossible to edit a blank page, and it is even difficult to edit as you go along when you don’t know where your story is going. But, it is also difficult to maintain continuity in a story if your writing is pure chaos.
You see, I am a pantser. I do not have an outline or plan when I begin writing a story. Half the time, I don’t even have a character’s name. When writing my fantasy, I had a little more than normal because it had developed alongside a memoir I was writing. As I got further into the draft, I realized I didn’t need to write the memoir any longer and that the fantasy was a much more interesting story. Thus, I started that Work in Progress (WIP) with around 25,000 words. That’s a lot to go off of and build from, but this is the exception. With my romance novels, for example, I start with a completely blank page and say “Who’s going to talk first?” Usually, it’s the female protagonist. I am more easily able to write from the female perspective. Once I figure out who she is and something about her, I can better pair her up with a male protagonist who fits her needs.
Being a pantser, however, doesn’t mean that I don’t follow structures. I’m very attuned to plot structures because I’ve always been a prolific writer. That’s why I’m so focused on making sure there is continuity in my manuscript as I write it. If I lose the plot, I will either 1) lose interest in the story, 2) never get it back, 3) lose my mind. Since the location of my mind is regularly in question, I choose to take a more reciprocal approach to my writing. If I’m doing writing sprints, I will write nonstop for the time frame. The next day, though, I will start by reading over what I wrote the previous day. I need to make sure it flows from the day before and that it sets me up for what I write today. I also clean up simple proofreading errors. Sometimes, I realize halfway through that I need to change POV or Tense. I’d rather fix that whenever it comes up than to finish the manuscript and have to revise the entire thing.
While this process may not be ideal for everyone, it works for me. By the time I finish my first draft, it is pretty clean, and I am able to focus on any developmental needs without getting bogged down in typos and punctuation issues. It minimizes the amount of time I have to spend in editing, and I’m more likely to have most errors corrected by the time my beta readers get the document. If not, they catch them. We all have to find the process that works for us.
If you’d like more information into the pantser/plotter conversation, I really like this video that was shared with me by a TikTok mutual. In it, she talks about quadrants of writing preferences, which gave me a much better view of my style than anything I read on the dichotomy.