Why a Zero Draft Can Get You Writing

If you thought the first draft was actually the first draft of a book, think again—because there is such a thing as a zero draft that can come before it.

The zero draft is an even earlier version of your story. It’s the bare bones of what will become a fully fledged book, somewhere beyond a detailed outline, but short of the full first draft.

For some writers, the lack of perfection in a zero draft gives them the energy to really pursue their story idea without having to think too hard about its final form.

In this article, we welcome The Novelry graduate and published children’s fiction author, Susie Bower. Susie joined The Novelry on The Classic Storytelling Class, and went on to sign with a top literary agent through our bespoke submission service, and has since published multiple children’s books. (You can read more here about her writing journey with The Novelry.) Susie’s new novel, The Invisibles, a middle-grade mystery, is published tomorrow in the U.K. by Pushkin Children’s Press. It’s the seventh of Susie’s books, and was written using the zero draft method.

Whichever draft you’re working on in your writing, Susie is here to explain what a zero draft means in practice, how she utilizes it in her own writing process to get to her first draft, and how it can help you.

Tomorrow, my new children’s middle-grade book—The Invisibles—will be published. After a year of writing and months of editing, my book-baby enters the world. And I must let it go, trust it to make its own way.

I believe it’s no coincidence that we writers refer to our books as ‘babies’. The process of writing a book is similar to that of conceiving and birthing a child. Tomorrow, I will be an ‘empty-nester’: back at the beginning and faced with a space. Whether you’re about to begin to write your first novel or—like me—your seventh, one thing remains the same: we all begin with emptiness.

The empty womb: allowing space

I’m prevaricating. Filling up the empty space in my life with mindless scrolling, snacking and reality TV. I’m telling myself that new ideas will come, while studiously avoiding the void of unknowing and uncertainty that follows every birthing.

I should know better.

Last year, I wrote a ‘secret novel’—a novel no one in publishing knew about. It took nine months. In the liminal space before I began writing, I experimented with reducing my dependence on the internet. At first, it was excruciating. Emptiness is scary. Suddenly, I was alone with only myself for company and reference.

But a month or so into the emptiness, a strange and magical thing happened: ideas for a story swooshed in, and I was soon scribbling them down like a madwoman. I’m convinced that it was the emptiness which created a space for the first whisperings of the book of my heart—an emptiness which also allowed me to transition from the analytical, left-brain mode of editing my previous book to the imaginative, right-brain creative mode which engenders new beginnings.

Where to find writing inspiration

The word inspiration comes from the Greek for breathe: out-breath followed by in-breath; emptiness followed by fullness. When we create a space, inspiration can more easily find its way to us—because inspiration is undoubtedly something which comes to us. We can’t force it to appear, any more than we can force an egg to germinate. Chasing inspiration is like chasing a potential lover—the outcome is rarely satisfying or long-lasting. Think of Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh, always dashing around, frantically chasing and organising. Pooh, in contrast, relaxes and lets things come to him.

So, how do we writers encourage writing inspiration to come to us? 

First, we can create small spaces in our lives: from deliberately removing an unhelpful element from life—a habit like phone-scrolling, or Netflix-bingeing—to decluttering a room or a drawer. You might make a space each day to walk in nature. Or you might simply pause during your day to breathe. And between these spaces, you can slow down: practise gentle, repetitive, physical activities where the creative mind is free to wander and play—knitting, showering, washing up, swimming, pottering.  

What small, empty spaces can you create in your life so that inspiration can find you? 

The intercourse of exchange

Babies are usually conceived after an act of intercourse. Intercourse is also defined as an exchange, especially of thoughts or feelings: a communion. For writers on the cusp of writing, intercourse begins as a communion with oneself.

At this point, you may like to create a receptacle, a container. Look upon it as an empty womb, a private and protected place of safety for whatever comes. It can take any form: a new document in some writing software like Scrivener or Word, a ring-binder file, a cardboard box. I decorate a new notebook with collage and write in it by hand—the physical, human contact between hand and page slows me down and gently reminds me of who I am and what I’m about.

Begin with an empty page, and yourself

Take some time to reflect on who you are now, as an individual, as the potential parent of your story child. Try some of these bullet points to settle gently into your writing.

• What are my values?
• What are my strengths?
• What fires me up?
• What would I stand up and out for?
• What do I care passionately about?
• What sparks my curiosity?
• What do I love to practise?
• What would I like to know more about?
• What are my dreams?

You may like to gather images and phrases from magazines—colours and textures, poems, stories from the news which excite you, touch you, anger you or set your heart racing.

This is you receiving from yourself, from your most private and valuable depths. And once you have turned within, you can begin to turn towards the world, to fill your well.

This filling will look different for each of us. It may be the joy of reading all the books you’ve been saving up, or taking long hikes in nature, or wild swimming. It may be visiting exhibitions, going to talks, signing up for a writing course. Some of us ‘fill up’ by being with people, exchanging ideas. Others receive through travel—little expeditions close to home or exploring new, distant horizons. You might try entirely new forms of creativity—singing, dancing, poetry, collaging, gardening, baking.

We writers are hoarders and collectors, taking a little of this and a little of that, processing and reassembling these scraps into our own unique creations. This ‘receiving time’ is a chance to offer yourself the richness and variety that nourishes you as an individual and brings you alive. 

The conception of an idea

At some point in this process—often when you least expect it—the fragmented scraps you’ve been gathering fuse into something new: the glimmer of an idea appears. This idea—while unformed—seems to shine, to whisper that it has the staying power to develop over weeks and months. It is the germ of your story, the nucleus.

I fully believe that this seed of an idea already contains within it the whole story, just as an embryo contains the human it will become. It knows what it wants to be, what it needs and who it is—and it will reveal itself to you, little by little, providing you offer it the nourishments of patience and gentle, regular attention: the time and space to develop naturally, like a baby in the womb, without undue pressure.

Here’s one glimmer from my first middle-grade book, School for Nobodies:

A child, rejected and abandoned, who has always felt as if something is missing, discovers a secret: they are half of a pair of twins, but separated at birth.
—Susie Bower’s notes for School for Nobodies

From my third book, The Dangerous Life of Ophelia Bottom:

Plastic as a symbol for sameness, falseness. Her flaw is that she wants to be like everyone else because it’s safer that way.
—Susie Bower’s notes for The Dangerous Life of Ophelia Bottom

And from The Invisibles:

Three protagonists, each of whom has a ‘magic’ power: the power of visual art... the power of aural art... and the power of physical art.
—Susie Bower’s notes for The Invisibles

Keep it loose

Remember, you are the author of this story, and you can do anything you want. Some things will stick, others will fall away. It doesn’t matter that you don’t yet know which is which. The eager left brain longs for everything to line up in a neat stack of bullet points and make sense in an orderly fashion. But this isn’t the time for order: it’s a time for abundance, for a chaos of possibility.

Gradually, the fragments of ideas will begin to coalesce into something. A something which just may become a story...

The gestation of the zero draft

And so, we come to the zero draft. The gradual development of the nucleus of an idea into the bones and flesh of writing.

(This is where ‘pantsers’* may roll their eyes and grind their teeth! Stick with me—lots of pantsers have been converted!)

So, what is a zero draft? I first came across the term at Writers’ HQ and later discovered that the crime writer, Sophie Hannah, does something similar, calling it her Gnocchi Method. You can call it the Extended Outline or the Craftless Draft. The name doesn’t really matter.

The zero draft is what you create before embarking on your first draft.

I’ve always loved the freedom of inspiration, and enjoyed the orderliness and precision of editing. But I loathed and feared what lay between: writing that dreaded first draft. For a confirmed control freak, it threw me into terror: I’ve got to step into the unknown! I’ve got to put my faith in uncertainty—set out on a journey without a map or a destination!

The zero draft was a godsend.

The draft where you tell yourself the story

Essentially, the zero draft is a way to tell your story to yourself. It’s a no-holds-barred, throw-in-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, meandering, imperfect, form-finding writing outline. No bullet points here. Sophie Hannah calls it the Gnocchi Method because it’s ‘part potato and part pasta’—partly the ‘skeleton’ of outlining and research, and partly the ‘flesh’ of scraps of action, dialogue and description.

For me, the zero draft represents liberation within a safe container—freedom from rules, ‘shoulds’ and outside eyes. It’s an intensely personal, permissive, mucky, exploratory voyage of a draft during which an idea gradually strengthens and becomes a story.

You may have a beginning. You may have a sense of some scenes later in the story, or perhaps a character arc. You may even have a feel for an ending, a slight visualisation of the final book. Put these down and gradually explore the parts in between. There’ll be many gaps: I don’t know what happens here, or This is where they overcome the baddie, but I’m not sure how.

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There are no rules in a zero draft

A writing friend of mine creates a bulging folder of images, ideas, scraps of description and dialogue, which she rearranges as the story develops. I write steadily in longhand until the bones of the story have formed, then I move onto the keyboard. Before beginning a first draft, I go through my zero draft and assemble it into rough chapters.

Here’s an excerpt from my zero draft for The Dangerous Life of Ophelia Bottom. You’ll notice it’s a hotch-potch of me ‘telling myself the story’, character notes, scraps of dialogue, thoughts and questions for myself, and research (which I needed to know, but which would mostly be discarded in the first draft):

Professor Potkettle is small, round and eccentric-looking. He seems bumbling, gentle, harmless and well-meaning (he’s so harmless and bumbling that Fee and Merry try to be helpful to him and look out for him).

He makes a gesture—puts his hands together as if in prayer?—and says the mantra Plastikus Stupendus Est, Diversus Periculosus Est.

‘Welcome to the Museum of Plastic. I have the honour of being your guide today. Stopford wouldn’t be what it is today without the wonders of plastic. Plastic is everywhere, in almost everything in our world. We use it for shopping bags and drinks bottles and takeaway containers for drinks and packing for food. (Maybe he shows examples of all these items.) It’s in cars and medical equipment. It’s everywhere in our houses—from the bottles and containers our shopping comes in, to our cleaning equipment, to the packaging our goods are wrapped in. In our carpets and in our clothes, in our televisions and computers. It’s cheap to make and sells at a profit.’

There are two aims for this visit: that the children should be brainwashed, ahead of their initiations, into the wonders of plastic. And that they should have it drummed into them once more that Different is Dangerous.
—Excerpt from Susie Bower’s zero draft of The Dangerous Life of Ophelia Bottom

No two zero drafts are alike. Your zero draft may be just a few pages, or it may be 20,000 words long. It could take a week or two of writing, or several months. Remember, nothing is set in concrete. In your zero draft, you can change anything: point of view, tense, events, characters, endings...

Your zero draft is a guide, a map: a rough idea of the terrain. And the best news of all?

In my experience, writing a zero draft often leads to a first draft which is much closer to a final draft. The knots that we traditionally wrestle with when we’re writing our first draft have been attended to and undone while they’re in the zero draft. And from this, the process of writing becomes playful, free—and even enjoyable. So why not give it a go?

It may just be that your future book baby will thank you for it. 

*Writers who prefer to ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ as opposed to plotters, who prefer to know where they’re going.

The Invisibles by Susie Bower

A magical kingdom. Four friends. One terrible mistake... In the Land of Magic, four friends live a life filled with wonder. But there’s one rule they must not break: never set foot on the Island of Darkness. So, when one child does the unthinkable, they must all pay a terrible price—exile to Wasteland, the bleak world where only grown-ups live. For Grace, this fate is particularly cruel. She wakes up with no memory of her magical home, or how she ended up here—and the only clue to her past is guarded by two hostile and mysteriously invisible children. As Grace uncovers the Invisibles’ secrets, she must work out a way to return home, before Wasteland traps her forever...

You can find out more about Susie at her website. And don’t forget to order The Invisibles in the U.S.A. and in the U.K.!

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