Why I’m calling this draft Draft 0

Writers have a lot of different names for the first draft of a novel – many of them not all that polite... This is the draft you write when you’re working out how the story fits together, when you’re telling yourself the story.

It’s not for public consumption.

It doesn’t always make sense.

As you write, the characters may change their names requiring you to go back and do a search and replace to make them consistent. Chances are that once you’ve done this you’ll notice a lot of squiggly red underlines beneath words you didn’t intend to change. In my most recent book, I changed a character called Abby to Karen. As a tabby cat also featured several times in the story, I then had to do another search and replace to change tKaren back to tabby.

It could be that some vital piece of a character’s identity will only be revealed to you halfway through writing. You could go back… But no, onwards, always onwards. There’ll be more to sort in the next draft. Right now, you just need to get to the end.

Then there are the places where you can’t make a decision about something or you need to go away and do some research. But the clock is ticking: on-wards, on-wards. And so your draft becomes a patchwork of margin notes, square brackets and highlighting.

Don’t even get me started about the beginning – you may as well face the fact that whatever you’ve written in this draft almost certainly isn’t actually how the finished novel will start. You have to put the words on the page and move on.

The ending will be worse. How do you tie up a story in a surprising but inevitable and satisfying way? How do you return your characters to a settled state showing that they have changed somehow from their experience? And what is more, how do you do these things without great big signs pointing out, “Look! Here’s how my character has been changed by the story!” It’s entirely possible that you have no real idea about what change has happened or what the underlying theme of your story is.

So here you are with your first draft, little more than a document full of words and ideas and notes strung together in some sort of order. Perhaps the most expressive of the expressions writers give this first draft is the vomit draft. No matter which way you look at it, it’s RUBBISH. It’s so thoroughly disheartening to look at that you could almost just press the delete key right now...  If only you hadn’t sweated so much over this worthless pile of words.

Here’s the thing, though. When I started the last book I wrote, I labelled it Draft 1 as I usually do. I will expect to get to around Draft 5 before I’m happy with it. But this time, just after I started to write, I happened to look at Robin Stevens Instagram account. Robin usually posts a picture of the corner of her screen every time she gets past another 10,000 words. I love that she does that – it’s the kind of thing I expect from not-yet-made-it writers but for her there are legions of avid fans just waiting for those 10,000s to show up in her next book. I’m always ready to cheer on any writer for their next 10,000! Anyway, in the comments Robin had called the draft Draft 0. And as soon as I saw this a lightbulb flicked on in my mind.

Draft 0! Of course! This first draft isn’t really a draft at all. It’s the raw material that Draft 1 will come from. It’s work you do on a lump of clay before you throw it onto a wheel and make a pot from it. Readers, I went straight to my computer and relabelled my mess of a manuscript Draft 0!

And now I’ve reached the end of Draft 0, I can put it away in its virtual drawer to mellow and mature for a while, confident that when I get it out again and discover that it’s not a book, it’s not a disaster. It's inevitable. It’s not supposed to be a book yet. I can love it for what it is: the raw material from which to build a book.

Why kids SHOULD read Enid Blyton

When I was ten I went to boarding school. Tucked into the side of my overnight case was my favourite book: Claudine at St Clares by Enid Blyton. But by bedtime, the book was hidden at the back of my drawer ready to be surreptitiously returned home at half-term. Within hours of my arrival, I had discovered that Enid Blyton was banned at my new school. I do not remember ever having this explained to me, and at the time I would certainly not have been able to distinguish between the books which were on offer in the school library and the Enid Blyton books I loved. I simply accepted the ban and carried on reading her books at home with an added frisson of guilty pleasure.

The trouble is, of course, that parents and teachers feel they need to quality-control their children’s reading. Enid Blyton does use dull, repetitive language, and the pervading tone is of talking down to the reader. Blyton’s books are peppered with sexual and racial stereotypes considered unacceptable today (although in modern reprints the publishers have done their best to remove these). And that’s before you get to the whole middle-class thing...

But in spite of all this, and even getting on for half a century since her death, there are plenty of kids who still love Enid Blyton. The language we adults see as uninspiring gives many children their first taste of fluent reading. Because they don’t have to think too hard about what the words mean or how the sentences are structured, they may for the first time experience that feeling of running their eyes over the black squiggles on the page and having them transform into a story in their heads. Allowing kids to discover that they have this amazing, magical skill, is, I think, key to turning them into readers. And there’s a wealth of Blyton to read. With some series fiction, children may be left not knowing what to read next when they’ve finished the series. They may have discovered the fluent reading trick, but their focus has been narrowed. But Blyton’s prolific output means that once a child has discovered her books, he or she may read their way through all manner of stories: adventure, fantasy, family, detective.

So, let them read their fill of Blyton. Chances are they will one day turn round and tell you the books are boring. And you can always speed the process up a bit. Do they read and re-read the Malory Towers and St Clare’s books? So provide them with some other school stories. What about What Katy Did at School (Susan Coolidge) or Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer). Move Famous Five fans onto the Young Bond books by Anthony Horowitz or Robin Stevens fabulous Murder Most Unladylike books. You could introduce Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair fans to E Nesbit.

One word of warning though. Don’t ever, ever read Blyton out loud if there is any way you can possibly avoid it. Aloud, all the banality of the language comes plodding out, and you’ll find no matter what a skilled reader-aloud you are, you just can’t help sounding like a comedian doing an imitation of Enid Blyton.

Oh my, jolly hockey sticks and lashings of ginger beer!

Blyton to relish
The …of Adventure series
Kids go off on adventures in far-flung places. Remember Willard Price’s adventure stories? These are like that with a little less of the shrunken heads and shooting.

Naughty Amelia Jane series
Because everyone wants to believe that their toys get up and mess around when they go out of the room…