Drafting Alice

Hello! I’m a senior in the Patapsco High School (in Dundalk, MD) literary arts program. Currently, we’re working on senior theses which will be full-length novels. Mine is going to be the longest in the class at over 400 pages! I’ve loved the Alice books for nearly a decade and I own every single one of them. I’ve lived in a single-parent household my entire life and I’ve learned so much from Alice. When I was in middle school, I talked about the series so much that my mom said she knew Alice better than Allie. When I have bad days, I still go back and read my favorite sections (which I have bookmarked)! Right now, my class is about to start revision and we’ve been discussing how the books we see and love have come a long way from their initial drafts. We thought it would be interesting to request a peek at an initial draft from some of our favorite authors and I immediately thought of you. Do you have anything from the drafting of Alice that you’d be willing to show me? I appreciate any response from you!!

I wish I had a draft to show you, but I no longer have room to keep them.  I can tell you this, however.  As I have been writing full time for sixty years, there were no computers then.  Final copies were typed up and sent to the the editor.  I wrote at least three drafts for every book, and wrote longhand on a clip board.  The first draft was sloppily written and it was more like stage directions, just figuring out which characters were in each scene, dialogue, action, etc.  After the first chapter was done, I immediately, if possible,  rewrote it, taking more care, extending the scenes, developing the characters, polishing the dialogue, etc.  But the third draft was the one I liked writing best, because the hard work of thinking out the structure had already been done, and I knew there were probably two more drafts to write yet to come, so the third draft was when I could just play around , try out new things, make it funnier (or more scary)….  My husband gave me a book once and on the inside page he had written May your life always be a third draft…..

Best of luck with your own writing!