I’ve done it. I’ve found the Holy Grail to storytelling when you have the mind of a golden retriever seeing a squirrel. It’s called layering. Well, I don’t know if that’s the official term for it, but it gets the job done.

It all started from Ray Bradbury’s famous advice:

Start short. Don’t start out writing novels—they take too long—“write a hell of a lot of short stories,” he said. Give yourself time to improve; with each week and month, you’ll see your stories improve…it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

And off I went, attempting to do just that, especially since I seem to have the attention span of a goldfish. Although not officially diagnosed, ChatGPT tells me I’m a great candidate for the AuADHD community. I tend to lose interest fast and get obsessed for a short period. And writing novels, unfortunately for moi, requires more concentrated ~~manhours~~ girlpower than that.

I’ve been on the hunt for the right techniques to keep me interested for the long haul. Numero uno is having a great idea, which—I’m happy to report—I have. But. To see it through all the way to the end takes tiiiime, when all I want is to have it done now.

Strangely, blog posts are no problem. I think because they can be disconnected or connected to other posts. It’s a more simple life. I can spend 4-12 hrs on a blog post over the weekend (or over 2-3 weekends), and it’s no big deal, because it’ll be over and out there and I can work on a totally different idea on the next blog post.

A novel requires connections, 4-12 hr weekends for perhaps over a year(s) depending on how complicated it’s going to get (and I tend to like complicated because I’m a glutton for punishment).

How does anyone stick to it?

By making the time it takes to get to the end faster.

And how do you accomplish that? By barely writing anything at all.

No, seriously.

What a seed scene actually looks like

You basically write a ‘seed draft’, a quick, small version of the story in its entirety. Take as much time as you feel comfortable to write it out in one sitting if you can. If not, you can split up the number of sessions. But each session, you’re trying to get to the end of the story. You’re not going to care about prose, getting the setting just right, writing out the dialogue, none of it.

Something like this:

Veya gets to the departure bay and sees the Labrador. Seeing it makes everything suddenly feel real. She’s leaving Redhaven. She thinks about visiting Arden’s grave yesterday and gets emotional, but she doesn’t want to cry here.

Someone makes a joke about her standing in the way. Maybe another recruit? They have a quick funny exchange that snaps her out of it. I don’t know who this person is yet or whether they’re important. [If they never show up again in the story, scrap it.] Then boarding starts and Veya goes in.

You’re going to write out the story as if you’re telling it to yourself or a friend. When you’re telling someone a story, you’re not worried about how you’re telling it. You’re just doing a run through of what happened and later wrap it all up together with a why if there was a why.

LATER when you’ve finished ‘writing’ the story, you can come back and fill out the scene to have it read like the real thing playing in your head (or get it as close to what you imagine anyway).

Something like:

Veya stepped into the departure bay and stopped.

The Labrador filled almost the entire viewing window, its white hull washed blue beneath the station lights. Around her, recruits streamed past in both directions, dragging cases over the scuffed deck plating, shouting their last goodbyes to their families who pressed against the barrier at the far end of the bay.

This was real.

Her fingers tightened around the strap of her bag until the fabric bit into her palm. Yesterday she’d been standing beside Arden’s grave. Today she was about to leave Redhaven. The thought sat in her chest like a stone she couldn’t swallow.

“You planning to board, or just stare at it?”

Veya glanced over. A dark-haired boy had stopped beside her, a battered duffel slung over one shoulder, grinning. He couldn’t have been much older than she was, but he carried himself with an ease she envied, as if the ship were nothing more than a bus he was running late for.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Good.” His grin widened. “More food for the rest of us.”

The laugh escaped before she could stop it, short and startled, and it loosened something in her chest she hadn’t realized was clenched.

Now if the prose/narrative comes easily to you, or you already hear bits of dialogue, by all means, put it in. But don’t dwell on things if it’s not coming to you easily. Remember, you’re just telling yourself the story as briefly and as fast as you can.

How did Ray Bradbury’s advice to write short stories lead me to the above ‘method’? (You thought I had forgotten about that thread I started out with, huh? I’m too smart to drop a thread and not pick it back up again, you reading a professional.)

Finishing a short story, setting it aside and then coming back to it with the intention of completely re-writing it because I hated the first draft is what made me realize I was AWESOME at rewriting. (That run on sentence is not evidence of this, I know. Bite me. Or don’t. I might like it.)

You may think you’re limited on words, or you may think the way you wrote it out the first time must be the only and the best way to write it out. But it’s not. Especially now that you’ve written to the end, you know exactly what to say. You know what’s important, you know what to leave out, you know what you can play around with. You can write with abandon now and everything just flows.

It’s all so much easier than the first time around when you were worried about everything. Is the story logistically sound? Are the characters coming alive? Does the setting capture you or set the right mood?

The second time around, you already know all that. The story has solidified in your mind. Now you just have to write it as you see it.

And I figured this out by painstakingly writing the first drafts of some short stories.

So it follows: if you’ve rewritten your own work before, and you know you’re good at turning something rough into something better, why not make the first draft easy too? Especially when you’re tackling something as enormous as a full-length novel.

Sidebar: There’s another benefit: it makes it much easier to let things go. The more time you spend perfecting something in that first draft, the more attached you become to it. Suddenly, that beautifully written scene has to stay, even when it no longer serves the story. But if the first draft is deliberately quick and rough? There’s much less to mourn. Cut it. Change it. Move it. Rewrite the whole thing. You haven’t spent three hours choosing the perfect metaphor for a sentence in a scene you’re now realizing shouldn’t exist.

That’s one question I decided to explore by looking up other authors that might employ the same (or at least similar) methods.

Here are some great examples:

AM Mulford’s 30k Drafts:

“So what I often like to do is I like to fast draft my book meaning it’s kind of like a skeleton draft if the finished book’s going to be 90000 words this draft is probably like 30000 words…

The book is done. It’s just not fleshed out yet. Like the dialogue might not have any dialogue tags. The scenes might not have any descriptions. There’s probably a lot of paragraphs that just say, “Fix this later. Insert witty banter here.”

I’m leaving myself notes as I go. Then I have to go back and…layer in and expand each chapter and flesh it out until it is a full-length book. And each time I feel like I’m kind of layering in new things and expanding it out more and more until it is the semi-polished book that goes to the developmental editor.

Kazuo Ishiguro: the four-week “Crash”

Ishiguro’s account of writing The Remains of the Day is probably the best case for the seed draft. For four weeks, roughly 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, he wrote what he called the “Crash”: a rough, whole-book version where he deliberately ignored style, contradictions, bad dialogue, and dead-end scenes. As he put it, “The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing.”

At the end he had more or less the entire novel down, but although considerable more work remained to write it up properly. The Crash was only the shadow of the final book.

Holly Lisle: grow the story from a sentence

Holly Lisle’s method starts even smaller. Before touching prose, she compresses the story into a hierarchy:

Theme in 15 words or fewer
Book summary in 25 words or fewer
Protagonist’s arc in one line
A short synopsis
A scene-by-scene inventory

Then she tests every scene against that model. Scenes that don’t advance theme, character, conflict, or story get crossed out or rebuilt. The story effectively expands downward, from a sentence to a synopsis to scenes to prose, and every addition has a job.

John August: the draft that teaches you the outline

John August starts with scattered key moments, writes a late scene before he’s solved how to get there, then builds a reverse outline afterward. The detailed sequence outline for Big Fish was created after the first draft, to show him what the screenplay was actually doing. His script archive preserves project chains like write-up, beat sheet, outline, pilot, and revised pilot.

Brandon Sanderson: the first draft as raw material

Sanderson’s approach shows what each layer is for.

Draft 1 establishes the crude form. In his words, it’s about “getting things in place so I can work on them.”
Draft 2 fixes major story and character problems.
Draft 3 is a language draft. Counting editing, copyediting, and proofreading, he describes 8 to 12 trips through the book by publication.

When he discovers a better personality or subplot halfway through Draft 1, he doesn’t stop and repair backward. He finishes testing the new version and normalizes it in the structural pass.

For your own draft: your first draft exists to provide you material to work with, nothing else. For writers, we first have to create our clay (the first draft) and then mold it (subsequent drafts, use as many as you need).

Ali Hazelwood: real additive revision, with real numbers

For hard numbers, there’s Ali Hazelwood. She said Bound was contracted at about 30,000 words, reached about 45,000 in the first draft, and landed around 60,000 in the final one. It isn’t a threefold expansion, but genuine growth, driven by her interest in expanding the story world and the relationship.

Anne Lamott: permission to be thin (or stupid)

Lamott’s “down draft, up draft, dental draft” sequence is the permission structure behind all of this. As she puts it, “the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down.” The next pass makes it coherent, and the last inspects it at fine grain. Discovery and judgment shouldn’t occupy the chair at the same time.

PDF Chart of All Writers Who Somewhat Write in Layers

Layered Drafting – Writers who explicitly draft in layers or iterations Download

Workflow for growing a lean draft

This is my synthesis of the methods above rather than any one writer’s system:

Story compass: one page covering premise, protagonist, desire, obstacle, and the theme question.
Plain beats: just enough to preserve cause and effect. Test with “therefore/because,” not “and then.”
Thin seed draft: a complete low-resolution manuscript. For a 80k word novel, I’d experiment with 25k words.
Reverse outline: for each scene, record what the character wants, the obstacle, the turn, the emotional movement, and why the scene must exist. Delete, merge, and reorder before fleshing anything out.
Structural expansion: add objective, pressure, escalation, turn, and cost to each surviving scene.
Character and emotion pass: read the whole manuscript looking only at motivation and emotional consequence.
Setup/payoff ledger: track what’s planted, where, and whether it pays off.
Texture pass: add detail only where it changes perception.
Sound pass: read aloud or use text-to-speech.
Compression pass: once the story is rich, cut what’s repetitive.
Feedback, then polish.

A proposed progression might look like 5–10 pages of beats, then a 25–35k seed, then a 60–80k structural draft, then an 85–100k rich draft, then an 80–95k compressed final.

The Takeaway

Make the story structurally true before making it richly rendered, emotionally true before making it elegant, and elegant before making it immaculate. (You hear that? Perfectionism is the last box you tick off, not the first.)