writing-questions-answered:

Anonymous asked:

Your blog is so helpful! My question is how do writers know when their first draft is ready and its time to start a new draft? Thanks in advance!

Your first draft is ready when you reach the end of the story. You start the second draft when it’s time to edit the first draft. Let me explain…

First Draft - the first time you write your story from beginning to end.
Second Draft - when you make changes to the first draft.
Third Draft - when you make changes to the second draft.
Fourth Draft - when you make changes to the third draft.
Fifth Draft - when you make changes to the fourth draft.

See how that works? New drafts are just about making changes to the previous draft. The method and process in which you do this is completely up to you. Some writers like to start a completely new draft from scratch and rewrite as they go while pulling from the previous draft. Other writers prefer to save a new copy of the previous draft and make the changes within the new document as they read through it. And, some people prefer to print out the previous draft and mark notes with a pen and post-its, then re-type the new draft based on those notes.

What you choose to accomplish with each successive draft is also up to you, but there are some general guidelines for what you might focus on in each draft:

First Draft - getting the story down from beginning to end for the first time.
Second Draft - making significant changes like cuts, additions, and rewrites
Third Draft - making significant changes to structure, scenes, characters, etc. often based on notes of beta readers, critique partners, and/or editors
Fourth Draft - making minor changes, such as sentence structure, wording, spelling, grammar, etc., often based on notes of critique partners/editors.
Fifth Draft - final draft/polishing run, looking for spelling and punctuation errors, formatting errors, grammar errors, etc.

Once again, you don’t have things in exactly that way. Some people accomplish all that in only three drafts. Some do it in six or ten. It just depends on how many it takes you to get through each of those important stages (major changes, minor changes, superficial changes) and which way you prefer to do things. :)

A strange phenomenon I’ve observed

So I’ve increasingly noticed that when people think of the fashion of a specific dynasty/era, for some godforsaken reason the image that pops into their head is always the fashion of the era that immediately succeeds it?? It’s never the preceding era either, just always exactly the era that came right after. It confuses me immensely. Some common examples are:

• 18th century Qing fashion being mislabelled as Ming
• 1920s Han hairstyles and early 20th century Manchu fashion in general being mislabelled as Qing
• 1950s cheongsam being mislabelled as Republican era
• Ladies with Hair Flowers being used as Tang Dynasty fashion resource, despite it being made after that (I’m not even interested in the Tang yet I know about this, it’s weirdly prevalent)

Pictorial evidence:

Painting from the book 古代风俗百图 by 王弘力. It’s labelled Ming but the grown ups are wearing obvious early 18th century (Qing) fashion.

Qianlong era (ca. 1750s) artwork from series 燕寝怡情图册.

Influential styling from the movie 橘子红了. It’s set in the Qing Dynasty but the hair and clothing look 1920s (Republican era).

1920s artwork.

Illustration showing “Republican era” cheongsam by artist 末春.

1950s (Mao era, People’s Republic of China) portrait by Sam Sanzetti. A lot of commercial “Republican era style” cheongsam you can buy on Taobao nowadays look extremely 1950s, to the point where if they were labeled 1950s they would be perfectly historically accurate, but they’re far fetched from the 1930s or 40s.

I literally don’t know why this is, it baffles me. If anyone has similar examples from other periods/places feel free to share.

depression-healthy-carrier:

Update:

I will be moving into my new apartment on the 19th of August. Posting will remain on hold until the 20th.

Following that, expect a good collection of quotes to emerge from Flint’s newer circle of friends (“someone’s gotta do it”) consisting of:

-Flint

-Flint’s stoner brother

-the brother’s fiancé

-a car guy

-a frat guy

-a high schooler

Thank you all for your patience. Great things will be coming to this blog very soon :)

I’m not even sure if this is funny but anyway FIRST Y2KVR POST I’VE MADE HERE LET’S GOOOO

Y2KVR belongs to @year2000electronics

My voice is obviously mine lmao