Waterbug Early Handwritten Drafts

Art school —especially art school with a focus on finding jobs in the entertainment industry— taught me that showing process is extremely important. I don't know if this policy carries over as much to the writing side of things. I doubt you'll sell anywhere near as many of The Chicken-Scratch, Handwritten Rough Drafts of Star Wars as you will The Art of Star Wars. Aborted rough drafts sure aren't as pretty as concept art, but, should anyone want to see my writing process, I'm going to try and document it for the things I post that wind up going through a bunch of revisions.

In the second draft, I was fairly certain that the bedroom scene didn't have any information or great character moments that couldn't be handled later, but I was very interested in including the hallway scene for its world-building details (the signs, Crabby's tubes, zero-G locomotion). I also tried to work a bit more characterization into Robins' political rival and that proved to be a dead-end.

For the third draft, I experimented with writing the scene out in prose, figuring that it would allow me to sprinkle description throughout the scene rather than the huge chunks of scene-setting description that I needed in script form. I also took a stab at present-tense narration inspired by Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

The fourth draft was my attempt at Kurt Vonnegut's fifth rule of short-story writing: "Start as close to the end as possible."

I went back to a script for the fifth draft. I was bouncing back and forth between this draft and the most recent draft on my computer (another good reason for referring to it as "Draft 6-ish"...). When I'd get stuck while typing, I'd switch to handwriting, and that seemed to fairly consistently jostle something so that I could keep pushing forward.