A Five Draft Man

OR, Meditations on the monkey that broke my typewriter

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"Draft" by Jeffrey Beall

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Recently, while doing research on a chapter in my upcoming book, REVISIONARIES about David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King, I came across an interview that he did with Stacey Schmeidel for Amherst magazine back in 1999, called “Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man”.

Wallace insisted on doing the interview through the mail, rather than over the phone, and when Schmeidel pointed out (in her first question) that this was a tad unusual, he wrote back with this explanation:

“I am a Five Draft man. I actually learned this at Amherst, in William Kennick’s Philosophy 17 and 18, with their brutal paper-every-two-weeks schedules. I got down a little system of writing and two rewrites and two typed drafts. I’ve used it ever since. I like it.”

For the purposes of the interview, Wallace explains it as a way for him to be more succinct, rather than rambling on over the phone. (As someone who does this myself, I sympathize, and Wallace's interview with Schmeidel is far clearer and less rambling than any others of his I've read.)

In Strong Opinions, a collection of Nabokov interviews, I recall the Russian author frequently insisting on doing the same thing: conducting interviews though the mail, claiming that it helped him compensate as a non-native English speaker.

But what really interested me about Wallace's response was this idea of being a “Five Draft Man”, some method of revision that he'd picked up as an undergraduate philosophy student. Was it a system of his own devising? Or was it something the Professor formally required? Ever-eager to borrow the tricks of writers I admire, I decided to dig around a little.

First I looked up William Kennick, the philosophy teacher, and found some wonderful interviews with him, but nothing about how he required a particular Five Draft method for his class.

Next, I looked at other writing guides online. Turns out there are a number of writing blogs out there with “five draft” revision methods, many of which seem quite thoughtfully designed, but I don't know that any of them are *the* method Wallace would have used, specifically.

Down at the Harry Ransom Center in The University of Texas in Austin, they have a collection of the papers that Wallace left behind after his death in 2008. Most are only available to scholars traveling to the archives there, but a few samples have been digitized now and are online for anyone to see. Just my luck, one set of images seems to show a 5 Draft method used for the “Author's Forward” in The Pale King.*

(I can't share the images here because they're protected by the estate (which I'm currently asking for permission to reproduce the images for my book) but if you click through there you can see them very clearly.)

They mark six drafts, including the smiley-face-sticker-covered “workbook” as the first draft. But if we think of that as a pre-draft, we'd have five, exactly as Wallace described in the interview: two handwritten drafts, two typed drafts, and a final draft. Each version becomes tighter and more effective, just as he indicated.

I still don't know if he fell into this on his own, or if it came from the Philosophy professor, or if it was inspired in either case by some other well-known system at the time.

But when I compared this back to the various online Five Draft Methods, I saw a similar flow of stages. Most of them work something like this:

1. A handwritten draft to get ideas down on paper.

2. A first rewrite, by hand, to organize those ideas into coherent paragraphs that follow a logical sequence.

3. A second rewrite, again by hand, focused on focusing each individual paragraph for clarity.

4. A first typed rewrite, now primarily fixing things on the sentence level.

5. A final typed rewrite, making word choice improvements and perfecting grammar.

This, or something like it, seems a strong, logical process. Multiple handwritten passes flesh out the ideas and organize them on a “macro” level. This might well be a pattern of early expansion, not compression, where we experiment more freely.

But then, we follow up with a few typed passes, increasingly narrowing, and dealing with the “micro” level more.

While this seems time-consuming, I love the idea of being able to give myself more specific goals for each pass, rather than to do what I normally do, which is to open up my document in Microsoft Word and begin to “hunt and peck” for revision issues, large and small at the same time, as I read it through. Sometimes I'm expanding, sometimes I'm compressing, or just going back and forth like an accordion.

In a Substack post about revision, George Saunders describes his approach to this method this way:

“The way I revise is: I read my own text and imagine a little meter in my head, with ‘P’ on one side (‘Positive’) and ‘N’ on the other (‘Negative’).”

Reading the story over and over, Saunders then makes lots of “micro-decisions,” trying to get anything that feels “N” to feel “P” instead. “And then I do that over and over, for months, sometimes years, until that needle stays up in the ‘P’ zone for the whole length of the text.”

This is, more or less, what I've always done too. I think it's what a lot of us do. We open the file, we read from the start, we fix little things, we move paragraphs around, we cut, we insert. When we get to the end we go back to the top and start over.

Lately I've come to think of this as the Everything Everywhere All At Once method, and increasingly I feel its limitations. Most often it ends when I'm simply exhausted and so blind to the text from rereading that I have to set it aside for months or years before I know if it is really right.

The problem is that, despite Saunders's metaphorical meter, quantifying every word and phrase and paragraph (all overlapping and codependent) as somewhere on a scale from P to N… is still pretty arbitrary. Our brains need to constantly jump from local to global concerns within the text. I might spend ten minutes repairing comma splices and rewording fragments, only to then decide the whole paragraph doesn't fit anyway. When I finally feel like every N has been P'd, is that real or am I just out of ideas?

Most revision experts I read now, distinguish between the kind of ongoing revising we do *as* we write, and actual “drafting” as Wallace describes, where we tackle specific sets of problems at a time. It used to be much more distinct. It used to be common to perform these sequential revisions, rather than a hundred simultaneous ones.

What happened? Well, the way we wrote changed. Literally.

Wallace graduated (summa cum laude) from Amherst in 1985, so when he talks about “typed” drafts, he was surely talking about using a typewriter. By the time he was working on Infinite Jest in the mid-90s he would have had access to word processing software, but it would have been a shift from the way he'd come up writing.

I commented to a friend the other day that our generation, graduating high school in the late 90s, was likely the last to be taught to type on typewriters. But even I wasn't, really. My high school had a Typing class, taught in a big room full of typewriters, but it was canceled after my Freshman year. The school library was, by then, already packed with computers and printers.

We had a IBM Selectric at home when I was in elementary school, but we also had a computer. My father was a programmer and my mother was in software (and briefly, my elementary school's computer teacher.) But my Commodore 64 didn't do Word processing that I recall. In elementary school I wrote my stories by hand in marble notebooks, and later red ones. If I wanted to type one up, I did it on the typewriter. But by the third or fourth grade we had an IBM and I was learning to touch-type on Mavis Beacon. (Either way, I don't think I was doing a lot of revision in those days.)

By the time I was in middle school and beginning to write longer essays and stories, I was definitely doing it on the computer in WordPerfect. At the creative writing summer camp I attended, we wrote by hand all week in notebooks and then had a few hours at the end of the week to use the computer lab to type and revise our favorite pieces. (I still have them all on floppy disks, written in software I probably can't open.)

By high school, I was writing both my school work and my own stories straight into the computer, and skipping the hand-written drafting completely.

When I left for college to study creative writing, my grandfather gave me an old typewriter to bring along. He was the sort of guy who found stuff like this (and by “stuff like this” I’m including classic cars) at yard sales and flea markets and took weeks to restore and rebuild them into working order. He fixed up the typewriter and he had it engraved with the letters EMH for Ernest Miller Hemingway, meant to inspire me in my work.

It was an incredible gift, and I promptly brought it to my dorm room and… never used it. The few times I attempted to, my roommates complained it was too loud, which—fair. Still I kept it around until, sadly, it got damaged a few years later when I loaned it out as a prop for our college theater group’s production of “Words, Words, Words” by David Ives (it’s a one-act where the actors play monkeys who are infinitely writing, eventually the works of Shakespeare.)

Words, Words, Words - Milken Community School

One of the “monkeys” knocked my typewriter off his stool and it broke, badly. Later when I moved to New York City, there was a Typewriter Repair Shop just around the corner from my apartment, so one day I lugged it over there. For a full year they worked on it, and eventually gave up and sent it back to me without charge. So now it sits, a decoration—still not part of my creative process except as an inspiration.

Oh well.

In any case, these days I definitely don’t do a lot of typewriting. And the vast majority of times I am writing my first drafts directly in MS Word, and then doing the old “hunt and peck” method, over and over. I will, at certain stages, print the pages out and review them with a pen in hand, and then go back to make changes in the file. Sometimes I’ll do this two or three times. It seems to get the job done, but still I wonder if I wouldn’t be better off if I took the time to write those earliest drafts by hand.

But then the other day, as I was teaching, I realized that I do—or have sometimes done exactly that. Flipping through my lecture notes for Creative Writing 1, I noticed that fourteen years ago, I'd hand-written a scene for what would eventually become The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards in that same notebook.

Almost definitely this would have been because I had given my students some sort of in-class writing assignment, and decided to use the 20 minutes of peace and quiet to get some writing done myself. And so I scribbled this out:

This scene was later typed up and lightly edited (online) as part of my Forty Stories project that year. A year later, I edited it again and included it as a standalone chapter in the earliest iteration of my novel. About a year after that, while editing the novel for publication, I ended up incorporating this material within a new chapter, “King Me” which had not been there before. Each time the material was changed, refined, pushed forward. And in my records I even have corrections, after all that, from the copyeditor during our very very final pass.

Looking at the whole sweep of it, you see the piece changing and… evolving.

While researching Wallace’s “Five Draft Method” I came across some articles written by scholars who spent time with his work at the Ransom Center, including this one in Assay Journal by Michael W. Cox looking at his story “A View From Mrs. Thompson’s” over the multiple draft process. Another, by Elliott Morsia, looks at the story “The Depressed Person” through what Morsia calls “genetic criticism”—comparing the changes in each draft on a sentence level and a larger level, with a focus on all the choices that Wallace made as he went from Draft One to Draft Five.

Reading through these essays feels (to me anyway) like getting to take a Master Class in writing from Wallace himself. It reminds me of the way that taking the time to work through distinct drafts, using different modes, is such a benefit to the process.

Today, I write these columns like this I even write on my phone, swiping one word at a time with my finger. It's convenient, but it's not great. I’m sure there’s plenty of mistakes. I mean—I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes.

When it comes to advice on drafting and revision, many times I've noticed we essentially are trying to reverse-engineer the typewriter, or at least escape the pitfalls of now-ubiquitous computer revision. If we didn't have the ability to make changes on the fly, how would we work differently? Might we work better?

Kurt Vonnegut wrote once that he wrote his novels a page at a time. Literally. He'd type a page, then retype it, then retype it, again and again, until it was perfect. Then he'd put that on the pile and move on to page two. After a few hundred pages like this, he had a book that was ready to go straight to the publisher.

I'd like to try that. I'd like to try handwriting my next story, maybe even twice. I want to type it twice, then one last time. Will it work? Can I be a Five Draft Man? Or maybe a Three or a Six? Maybe I can try to get the typewriter repaired again.

I don't know. But I think the best part of creative writing is that we get to mess around and find out.