So You Want To Become A Writer Too, Huh?

Warn­ing! WRITING DRAFTS is still under devel­op­ment. For any offers of col­lab­o­ra­tion, please con­tact: ccghawkins00@gmail.com

Writ­ing Drafts is my lit­tle cre­ative writ­ing pro­gram that I’ve devel­oped along­side writ­ing Chal­lenger’s Chase. I liken it to a writ­ing jour­nal; except crys­tal­lized. It was made with the idea that by writ­ing down and for­mal­iz­ing my process, I might become a bet­ter, more effi­cient writer. ‘From idea in the head, to a book on the shelf’, was the imag­i­nary tagline…

I know, I know. Some of you are already on edge after read­ing bull­shit like that. There are a lot of hack writ­ers out there ped­dling how-to garbage, after all. Or maybe you just don’t like the idea of apply­ing any type of ‘sys­tem’ or ‘process’ to your organ­ic flow, I get that too. But writ­ing and fin­ish­ing a book is a ter­rif­i­cal­ly dif­fi­cult task, so why not rely on the expe­ri­ence of a writer that you enjoy?

Writ­ing Drafts comes in six stages:

Pre-Draft

~ the ideation and plan­ning part of the writ­ing process.~

First Draft

~ the draft­ing and explo­ration part of the writ­ing process.~

Beta Draft

~the redo­ing and restruc­tur­ing part of the writ­ing process.~

Cri­tique Draft

~the revis­ing and refin­ing part of the writ­ing process~

Final Draft

~the pol­ish­ing and print­ing part of the writ­ing process~

Post-Draft

~the pub­lish­ing and mar­ket­ing part of the writ­ing process ~

These stages are… sup­posed to cov­er every­thing a bud­ding writer needs to know, and more than that wher­ev­er pos­si­ble. Of course, I am hard­ly the arbiter of all things writer­ly (Writ­ing Drafts is a liv­ing doc­u­ment) nor is real life hard­ly as clean as this dia­gram makes it out to be. Don’t be sur­prised if you end up back­track­ing or skip­ping ahead while you fol­low along. It’s like a line of best fit for a scat­ter­plot graph. They draw it as a clean and sim­ple line, but there’s a whole lot­ta zig-zag­ging if you plot from point to point.

If Writ­ing Drafts sounds use­ful to you, go ahead and click on the but­ton below to start the first step of the pro­gram, the Pre-Draft phase. It cov­ers every­thing you need to know about writ­ing before you type a sin­gle word onto the page, includ­ing sto­ry ideas, devel­op­ing your premise, decid­ing what your sto­ry will look like, and more.

Get ready to take some notes. Because if you’re going to write, you might as well do it right.

Click to begin the Writing Drafts program.