Evolution (Zero Draft to First Form)
It’s possible ‘zero draft’ is my favorite piece of write-speak. I hear it all the time from academics, and in the fan fiction community, and from my compatriots in various writing forums/coffee house clubs. In the world of plotsters and pantsters it’s an oft-repeated mantra by those of us who who prefer to just sit down in front of our keyboards and GO!, no outline required.
Yup, I love me some focused freewriting.
I also love to look back and see how my very rough ideas evolve from zero draft to first or second form. While the bones of the story usually remain the same – I always know from the beginning the tale I want to tell – settings, minor plot points, even characters may transform completely as I flesh out the final version.
You may have seen some of my earliest versions of Earnest Ink (zero draft was titled Sketchbook):
Compare those early ideas to draft two below and you can see how things have changed as Hemingway’s story has evolved. I’ve gone back and added in important pieces of plot, changed up some characters, and completely cut out minor background points in order to streamline the gist of the narrative.
The trick to wielding your zero draft wisely is to always remember it’s the barest of beginnings, a first attempt, the merest seed in the garden your novel will eventually become. Don’t let it constrain you. Rework, rewrite. Strike some pieces completely even as you polish others until they shine. A zero draft is unconscious creativity at its best. Draft one is where we pantsters face the nitty-gritty logistics of our craft.
- Labor Day
The way I became famous is this: I was in Seattle on Labor Day when the bombs went off. In the middle of the resulting chaos someone snapped a photo of me giving CPR to a toddler wearing a gauzy purple tutu and tiny white Converse high-tops, and saved it to Twitter.
I wasn’t supposed to be in Seattle that weekend but at the last moment Don, my boss in Boise, decided to close Tank Tatts for the holiday. Outcast was playing Key Arena, and Don had two tickets burning a hole in his pocket – one recently unattached because his girlfriend had just dumped him when he refused to spend Labor Day floating the St. Joe river. I didn’t blame him; even in September St Joe’s is cold as fuck, and so, in my humble opinion, was his ex.
So, I had a buddy with a car and some extra cash in my pocket from some simple touch-up work I’d done beginning of the week, and a ticket to Outcast. We drove most of the night, taking shifts behind the wheel, and stopping twice at a Denny’s for pie and a piss, once in Coeur D’Alene and again in Cle Elum. We coasted out of the Cascades and into the Emerald City before morning rush hour.
As we were scoping a street spot to ditch Don’s ancient Honda Accord for the day, I watched the sun rise on the Space Needle. Sometimes I stop and think how I’m one of the last people who ever did see that.
We never made Key Arena but we did have coffee and bagels at Zeitgeist. After we hung around throwing bits of bread at the gulls in a nearby park. Around nine when the public market on Pike opened we wandered that way in search of distraction and cigarettes.
Later I learned that the seven devices were timed to go off all together at ten-thirty when downtown would be swarming with tourists and locals out for the morning, but the one buried in a trash can near Pike’s Seafood went off early.
There was no bang like you see in the movies or on television, just a blast of hot air and a rumble. The ground shook me off my feet and onto the damp pavement, newly hosed clean before market opening. I remember that the concrete was cold, and smelled like fish and lilies. After that everything was falling, pieces of glass and metal, fresh flowers and shellfish, people and bits of people. Part of a car tire, all shredded rubber split like two black-feathered wings, fell on my head from the sky. It hurt.
I remember that someone was screaming and I knew it wasn’t me because I was biting my lower lip so hard I could taste iron. It was an inhuman, despairing sort of howl and it frightened me badly so I crawled in the opposite direction, wanting to get away from the sound.
I ended up under an overturned table, surrounded by overturned florist buckets spilling water and bunches of candy-colored tulips. A man lay on his side next to me. I knew he was dead because where his chest should have been there was a mash of black and red gristle, and he sure as hell wasn’t breathing anymore. The little girl wearing the tutu was crumpled behind him in a puddle of water. She was on her stomach, head turned toward the man. Her eyes were wide open and the exact shade of mid-day Boise summer sky. The water and the pavement around her were turning pink.
My hands shook as I rolled her over. She wasn’t breathing either, but I couldn’t see any obvious reason she should be dead so I just did what we’d all learned in Mr. Miller’s first period high school health class and started kiddie CPR. Her mouth tasted of those cinnamon sugar donuts they used to sell from carts in the market.
I haven’t been able to stomach cinnamon sugar or donuts since.
That’s when the guy used his mobile to snap a photo. You can still find it online, obviously, and also in an antique frame on President Shannon’s desk. She showed me that herself, and said how she looks at it sometimes to remind herself that God works in mysterious, magical ways. I don’t believe in God, and I hate to see myself in photos even post-T, but by now I know better than to scoff at mystery.
The photo shows me bent over the girl, hands on her tiny breastbone, my ear to her mouth. She’s a fairy princess in purple tulle, her blonde hair plaited into a neat bun. Her white Converse were probably pristine when she put them on that morning, but in the photo the shoes are spattered with scarlet. It’s not her blood; it’s mostly mine. I’m bleeding from my nose where the tire hit me, and from the place in my thigh where a long shard of jagged metal sticks out like some sort of gruesome alien appendage.
In the shock, I didn’t feel the wound. I couldn’t hear anything because of the blast, so when the guy with the phone finally put down Twitter and scrambled across debris to help I didn’t get at first that he was trying to put pressure on my bleed. I would have punched him in the face for groping my thigh if I hadn’t been so busy saving the tiny ballerina’s life.
And I did, too. She started breathing again just before I passed out from blood loss. She’s a second grader in Bellevue now and at Christmas and on her birthday her mom sends me a card. The guy with the mobile phone who took the photo and then saved my life is called Greg. He’s a stockbroker who lost his wife, and dog, and luxury apartment in the attack when the five of the other six bombs went off ten minutes later as planned.
Don didn’t make it. His name is on the plaque at the Seattle Memorial. I bring him flowers and a pack of cigarettes every year on the anniversary of his death when the city flies me across country to read out the names of the dead from a podium in front of more cameras.
People come from all over the country, to hear my voice and see my face and, if they’re lucky enough to be able to afford a ticket, to watch me make magic.
Greg’s photo was everywhere for weeks after: on the internet, on the television, in print. My dad cut me out of the newspaper and threatened to hang the clipping on the wall near the TV but I convinced him that was probably in bad taste. Honest to shit I thought it would be my fifteen minutes of fame and then I could get back to everyday life in Boise, or at least as close to everyday life as anyone was allowed.
I was hardly the only Good Samaritan that Saturday. Five hundred and thirty-two people died in the bombing but many more escaped with their lives because someone stopped to help. I figured Greg’s photo would be forgotten when the next bit meme came around, and I could get busy trying to forget that one of the one hundred and sixty-one dead in Pike Place was my boss with the cold girlfriend and an extra Outcast ticket in his pocket.
But it didn’t happen that way at all. A few weeks after airspace was cleared again for domestic travel President Shannon rode Airforce One down to Boise and walked right into St. Luke’s where I was recovering from surgery and shook my hand. Then she asked me if I wouldn’t like to design a tattoo for remembrance and ink it myself on her left wrist where she could always see it. I was high on painkillers so of course I said yes.
Come New Year’s I was set up in the oval with my machine and more cameras all around, sick with nerves and hoping my fifteen minutes were about to time out. The tattoo I’d designed was simple, meant to go quickly, a minimalist tulip blossom and stem outline in black. I’m an artist – I’m good what I do – but when I finished up and scrubbed away Shannon’s blood with a wet gauze, it wasn’t my artistic talent that made everyone gasp.
It was the candy-hued flower rising in vibrant color above the outline I’d inked into the President’s wrist, a living snapshot hovering just above her dark flesh, attached and yet somehow separate. Startled, Shannon jerked away from my hand. The flower, drifting in full color above her wrist, went with her.
There, in the Oval office I smelled fish and lilies, and I tasted cinnamon sugar on my tongue. Everyone watching, from the members of the press corps, to the congressmen and senators and interns who’d popped in for the occasion, to the VP in his button up suit to President Shannon herself, understood something had changed in our world.
I only understood that and my fifteen minutes of fame weren’t clocking out any time soon.
- Pink Jones
“Does it hurt?” the boy at my counter asks, biting his lip in concentration as he watches me work.
I’m perched on a swivel stool, disposable razor in hand. It’s too hot in my studio, even with the industrial fans whirling overhead and the door propped wide open. Evening light slants in through the door, and through the north-facing, floor-to-ceiling window panes that look out onto West 46. It’s a muggy, too warm for New York in September, and all of Hell’s Kitchen is wilting, including my client.
The girl in my chair is sweating down the crook of her jaw and under her chin. She’s got glitter paint on her eyelids and on her cheeks – a new fashion I just can’t quite get behind – and under my lights her perspiration looks like a smeared constellation.
I can’t remember the girl’s name, but that’s fine because customer relations isn’t my job. She wants a bee inked onto her collarbone, one of those tiny, fat winged bumblebees you find on good tequila bottles. It’s not her first tattoo – she has a rose on her ankle – but it’s her first from Earnest Ink and she’s eager, nervous, and a little drunk off the cheap wine she swallowed out of a belt flask before sitting in my chair.
Usually you’re not supposed to ink anyone who’s relied on liquid courage for balls, but this girl’s paid a lot of money for my services so I’m inclined to look the other way.
“Does it hurt?” the boy at my counter repeats with more emphasis. He’s leaning against the glass, leaving greasy fingerprints on the surface as he strains to get a better look at what I’m doing. I peek at him from under my eyelashes as I wipe sweat from my nose before I drip on the girl in my chair. He looks like one of the street kids that have taken to running in packs near the cruise terminals, sleeping in old, abandoned cargo containers and panhandling up and down the marina.
He’s skinny and small, hair dyed an unsettling violet and styled into spikes all over his head. He’s got a silver ring in his septum and more in his ears; his eyelashes are coated with purple mascara to match his hair and green glitter paint sparkles on his lids. His T shirt and jeans are torn and dirty and he’s got a pack of black market cigarettes rolled into one sleeve against his upper arm.
“No more than any other ink. Get off my counter, you’re leaving streaks.”
That’s Mandy, working customer relations from behind the shelter of our gigantic, old-school cash register. The register’s solid brass and fucking built like a tank and Mandy keeps pepper spray and a butterfly knife in the drawer with the cash in just in case. Mandy hates people in general, and Manhattanites in particular. She used to be a paralegal at a firm in Connecticut before she saw me on TV and decided she could make more money as my bodyguard and agent.
“Sorry.” The kid jerks away from the counter top as I lean back over the girl in my chair. He clears his throat. “I mean, I’ve never had a tattoo at all. Does it usually hurt?”
The girl in my chair twitches and giggles when I scrape the razor gently over her collarbone. A lazy breeze sneaks in through the open door, along with shouts and muffled laughter. It’s tourist season and outside Earnest Ink the sidewalks are busy with gawkers. Mostly they just take pictures under my sign or through the windows. If they’re stupid enough to come in without plenty of cash in hand Mandy chases them quickly out.
I’m guessing the street kid spent his last handful of dollars on the cigarettes rolled in his sleeve, so I’m not sure why Mandy’s letting him linger.
“Depends on the person, depends on where,” she drawls while I swab alcohol over flesh, disinfecting. The liquid’s cold and the girl in my chair shivers.
“Will that one hurt, the one he’s doing there?”
Mandy shifts restlessly behind her register. Bumblebee Girl is our last appointment of the day. It’s miserable hot and Mandy’s bored and probably hungry, and maybe that’s why she lets the kid stay, for entertainment. But she doesn’t really want to have a conversation. Probably she just likes the look of his hair and his eyes. Mandy’s forty-five and dresses like a grandmother in knitted cardigans and long skirts but she keeps up with the latest city fashions with an eagerness bordering on obsession.
“Yes,” I answer without looking up from my work. “On the collarbone, it will hurt.” I smile apologetically at my client but she only giggles more. Cheap wine has dyed her lips red. I test my machine, squeezing the trigger. It vibrates under pressure of my fingers.
“You him?” the kid asks eagerly. “Hemingway?”
I nod. Hemingway’s my surname, but it’s what I go by, have done for the last five years since I escaped Boise for the more forgiving big city.
“Huh.” He sounds reluctantly impressed. “Did you really do Artic Fox in their hotel room before their last show?”
Mandy snorts. Bee Girl blushes pink under her paint. I check my ink cup before ripping a pair of latex gloves from their box near my machine. I strip the gloves on one finger at a time, then check again to make sure they’re sound and sanitary.
“Matching ink, all five,” I agree. It hadn’t been a very exciting job. They’d been specific and unimaginative about what they wanted, and too stoned at the end to react much when the sailors’ swallows tethered to their biceps came spread their wings. “Photos in the red book, there. Take a look.”
I hear the kid open the book and flip through. I set my needle against Bee Girl’s collarbone and squeeze. The machine sends vibrations her bones and mine, together.
“How much?” the kid asks. “For a small one?”
“You’re not old enough,” Mandy retorts. “Come back in a few years and then we’ll talk.”
“I’m seventeen!”
“Law’s eighteen on the island,” I say over the buzz of my machine. “I never break it.”
“It’s a stupid law,” the kid complains. “Are you sure you’re him? I expected someone…taller.”
“License is right there, in the window,” Mandy replies. “And rules are rules so fuck off and come back when you’ve grown pubes.”
Mandy can be a real bitch, but I don’t mind. Life can be a real bitch, too.
The kid takes her advice and fucks off, stomping his way out of the studio and into the stale afternoon. Under my needle the bumblebee begins to come to life.
We shut shop later than I’d planned. After Bumble Bee girl we get a walk-in, an Enlistee with a Platinum MasterCard in his wallet looking to celebrate turning forty. He wants his badge number done on his pectoral in typically gothic script. It’s the sort of thing I can easily freehand and it’s not every Enlistee who lives to see their fortieth birthday day so I nod Mandy’s way and she wipes his card. Like Bumblee Bee girl he sits quietly in my chair as I work, sweating. He flinches beneath my needle. His bare chest is muscular, the pale flesh pitted with small scars and dusted with freckles. He’s not large, but he’s solid after years in service. There’s gray in his close-clipped beard and sprinkled through his blonde buzz cut.
He closes his eyes. Mandy leaves her refuge behind the counter, crosses the studio, and firmly shuts the front door. A moment later I understand why; thunder rumbles, shaking our window panes. A gust of sudden wind blows a funnel of trash along the sidewalk. The muggy gray sky splits open and late evening becomes a twilight deluge. Pedestrians shout and scatter for cover. There are four more stories above Earnest Ink – old apartments now used mostly for storage – but I can hear the rattle of rain on the building’s roof through the radiator pipes we share.
“Summer in the city,” my client says, smiling grimly, as another bout of wind throws a spatter of rain against the windows. “Wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
I refrain from pointing out we’re closer to fall than summer. Weather on the island in early autumn is always a crap shoot. And he’s not wrong – we wouldn’t trade it for the world.
The bell above the door jangles warning just before it cracks wide enough to allow the scent of wet city – old piss, cut grass, over-ripe produce and motor oil – into the studio. Grace slips in with the stink, wind-torn and half soaked, then pushed the door to and puts her back against it as to brace it against the storm.
“Jesus on a fucking stick,” she says over the buzz of my machine, “It’s like the fucking Amazon out there.”
The Enlistee in my chair muffles an amused noise, making me wonder if he’s seen the actual Amazon. It’s possible he has, probable even. The seven-digit badge number I’m etching into his skin begins with a 3, which means he’s been specially trained for off continent work, which explains how he’s got enough credit on his MasterCard to afford my services.
“Client,” Mandy warns Grace.
“Hemingway.” Grace groans. “Why are you still working? It’s Friday night. We’ve got a place to be. You promised.”
“Almost finished.” I pause and glance up, watching in amusement as she struggles to repair the damage wind and rain have done to her elaborate updo. She’s traded her day kit for a black T-shirt, purple tutu, rainbow tights and black tap shoes. Unsurprisingly, she’s got pink glitter paint on her mouth and on her cheeks.
Catching sight of my client, she arches one brow in silent surprise. I don’t blame her for astonishment. Most grunts would rather spend their reserve on sweets or a show, costly old-school comforts, escapism. The guy in my chair is maybe one of three Enlistees I’ve inked since I set up shop in Hell’s Kitchen. Either he’s an ascetic or someone in Washington really likes him.
“Don’t rush,” Grace says, meaning the opposite, before settling herself in the comfy red velvet settee I keep on hand for visitors and afternoon naps, and taking out her mobile. Thunder rumbles. Rain on the glass makes it seem like the studio is under water. “Not like Pink Jones will play Cleo’s again any time soon. Fuck me. Please God let the rain keep the paps away.”
I look down at my client. He stares back, eyes now open, concerned. His irises are so dark as to be almost black but for flecks of rust. He’s big enough, and strong enough, to crush me into chalk if he decides I’m taking advantage. There’s a lot of money between us and at this point there’s no going back.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I promise, smiling gentle reassurance. “At Earnest Ink, perfection happens in its own time.”
Bullshit, of course, but he buys it hook line and sinker.
By the time I’m finally finished and we’re cashed out and closed up it’s dark outside. Mandy waves a terse good-bye and makes for the subway at 52nd, head bowed against the wind. Grace is sulking loudly without making a sound but I’m immune to her dramatics. Grace and I used to have sex before we decided we were better off as friends without benefits; I know her moods better than my own.
Grace is a theater major at AADA when she’s not working her father’s Chelsea art gallery. She’d sell her soul for even the smallest a role off-Broadway but she’s lacks the subtlety needed for that lucky break. Grace over-acts everything, even her orgasms are a production. After a while it’s enough to wear a person out.
It rains on us all the way to Cleo’s but luckily the walk’s not far. Two blocks east of Earnest Ink we leave Hell’s Kitchen for the more massive city skyline near the lower end of Central Park. Here it feels like all of Manhattan is under construction, scaffolding and blue builder’s wrap covering many of the sky scrapers from top to bottom. It’s late enough in the evening that the nail guns and jack hammers and generators have gone quiet, but a flock of long-necked cranes loom in the rain, lit from the bottom by white security spotlights, casting strange shadows over the sidewalk.
The sidewalk on both sides of 8th Avenue are crowded with pedestrians heading home from work, or out for dinner or to market. The shops that used to stay open 24 hours a day close at 8, an hour before curfew stops the subway running. Yellow cabs inch north along the wet pavement, nose to tail. Their windows are mirrored for privacy; even close up I can’t see the drivers or their fares behind the silver glass but I can my own reflection staring back: short dark hair, pale eyes too large in a thin face. Rain drops are beading on my eyelashes, and on the over-sized, vintage Pink Jones hoodie I threw on hours earlier before leaving for work. The band’s logo – a long nosed, cartoonish armadillo smoking a large blunt – is reflected in reverse across my chest, one eye closed in a perpetual wink.
I glance away. Grace, a several steps ahead as usual, slows to grab my hand and tug me on, turning sideways to keep her tutu from getting squished in the crowd. She thinks I don’t know she’s wearing it because of me, a subtly gruesome reminder, her ballerina princess accessory against my brooding dark jeans and black boots. Grace might scoff out loud at paparazzi and autograph hounds, but she likes to show me off whenever we’re out because my fame usually gets her free drinks and free food.
Grace, for all her family’s old money, is broke as shit.
Cleo’s is midtown’s worst-kept secret. Located in the basement of The Plaza Hotel, recently renovated, the club’s so new it’s still shiny and clean in a blemished city. The club’s owner, a retired Los Angeles movie mogul, has enough clout to bring in acts from all over the country, interstate travel visas be damned. He must be greasing more than a few palms at the Port of Entry, but nobody on either end’s complaining and Cleo’s keeps landing all the best bands, Pink Jones being only the latest in a string of the club’s musical successes.
Back of The Plaza on 59th Manhattan’s pre-curfew crowd has turned into a well-behaved mob. Seems like half of midtown has turned out to catch a glimpse of Jones or her bandmates. Undeterred by the wind and rain people press up against temporary barriers put up outside the club’s entryway specifically to keep gawkers back. A handful of Enlisted linger, wary of trouble, but the looky-loos seem content to stand in the weather, mobiles in hand, taking snapshots of Cleo’s neon sign and breaking occasionally into snippets of the band’s latest hit.
Grace’s fingers tighten on mine. As I’m struggling to pull my hood one-handed up and disguise my face I catch a flash of violet out of the corner of my eye: it’s the street kid from earlier in the day, the one who left smears on Mandy’s counter while he made fun of my height. He’s crammed up against one of the concrete barriers, squeezed between a group of star-struck teens wearing head-to-toe faux leather and Pink Jones ribbons in their hair, and a tall woman with a press tag around her neck and a camera in her hands.
The boy shows me straight white teeth in a wide grin. The rain has done nothing to subdue the garish color in his hair.
“Hemingway!” he shouts, loud enough to be heard over the weather, the muted rumbling of the crowd, and the angry horns of yellow cabs one street over. “Are you here for work of to see the show? Hemingway! Are you gonna ink Jones?” He laughs.
Curious faces turn our direction. A dip my chin but too late. A hundred flash bulbs go off, turning rain drops into tiny stars. Dazzled, I blink. Someone else shouts my name. People in the crowd clap and tamp their feet. The Enlisted peer my direction, mouths and eyes flat beneath their visors.
“Who the fuck is that?” Grace wants to know as she pulls me hastily out of view, down several steps off street level toward the club’s recessed door. “Do you know him?”
“Just some street punk,” I hazard, baffled. “Never met him before today.”
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