OLD DRAFTS - SPOILER ALERT!
On this page, I share parts of my first drafts of 10th Grade with My Interesting Interactions, My Terrific Travels, & Me. This includes sensitive information about the plot as a whole, so if you haven't read the book yet, PLEASE don't scroll any further down this page! Instead, buy the book on Amazon, read it, and then you'll be welcome to explore this page :)
Unlike the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade first drafts, which were written for my own enjoyment and thought of as final at the time, the 10th grade drafts were written with the knowledge that they would eventually be edited and published. I stuck with my method of creating little books from stapled sheets of printer paper, but I was a lot less careful about the presentation of these books, since I knew they were simply first drafts. For that reason, a lot of the writing in the 10th grade first drafts is actually worse than the writing in the 9th grade first drafts. I didn't care if my ideas were sloppily executed, or if the dialogue was pathetic, or even if I had notations like <insert conversation here>, because I knew I'd be making revisions. I also started cutting way down on the quantity and quality of my illustrations, since I knew they wouldn't be showing up in the final drafts.
In the first draft of "Words Apart", I actually wrote out a lot of Chinese characters! My brother studied Chinese in high school and college, and I enjoyed learning along with him.
You can see some of my in-progress edits and cross-outs here in the first draft of "Don't Bug Me, Buddy."
Here's part of my first draft of "Gotta Be Aware." Notice the stars before "We started talking about the party" and after "and then fell silent." I was initially going to clip out that whole conversation in between those stars. When I did my final edits, though, I decided I liked it and wanted to keep it.
"More Than A Feeling" is where my notes to self really started picking up. I decided to switch the location of the girls and Jack's dad because I figured the girls would be way too interested in what was going on if they noticed Jack and Allisen going into Jack's room and closing the door! (whereas Jack's dad, if he's busy watching TV, might not notice)
The first draft of "Santa Claus Is Comin'" was just a mess. My mentality as I was writing it was "I want to get this first draft done as quickly as possible so I can move on and write the other first drafts that need to be done as quickly as possible." You'll notice a LOT of cross-outs and notes to self as you browse the excerpts below. The December 9 entry was one that I realized I wanted in the story, but I'd already passed that date, so I just inserted it after the 11th, with a notation to move it to its proper place in the final version.
"Straighten Up" originally had a sub-plot revolving around paying for the ski trip. I decided I didn't like it and didn't want to include it in the final draft. If you browse through the excerpts below, you'll see a lot of the entries that ended up being deleted entirely, as well as some that were modified.
In the first draft of "Shh! Don't Tell!" the part where Rushton asked Ellie to the dance and she said no had a bigger effect on the plot as a whole. It caused some tension between Rushton and Ellie that carried over into "Rumor Has It." I changed this for the final draft because I decided I wanted "Rumor Has It" to focus only on the rumors surrounding Jack.
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As I mentioned before, "Rumor Has It" initially had a whole bunch of rumors floating around. In the excerpts below, you can see what I mean! The last two images don't have anything to do with the extra rumors, but I included them so you can see how tiny my writing was on those last two pages of the first draft book. I didn't want to have to staple more pages in (it would be really difficult since the book was already so thick), so I just crammed everything in with super small writing!
In this excerpt from "Mission Possible!" you can see several notes I wrote to myself about what to include in the final version! Also, the slogans on the shirt were actual slogans from the Outreach360 shirts we wore on my trip to Nicaragua, but I changed the organization Allisen was working with to a fictional one for the final draft.
