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So, being somewhat borderline on the obsessive scale, I typically keep first drafts of all my stories. There's a little folder "Drafts" on my PC. Sometimes I even keep the in-between drafts too. And because I am the curious type, I wanted to compare my first drafts to my "finished" drafts. I don't have every first draft. Some of the stories I ran through are stuff old enough to be retired from sending around, stuff I did in college, before I had a "PC" and so, while I might have older drafts, they would be sitting on my Commodore Amiga. Which still works, and is sitting in the basement, but isn't going to help me these days.
So I had about 10 first drafts to compare. What I found was, to me at least, interesting. In eight out of ten cases, the edited stories when compared to their first drafts became more neutral. That is, when you compared the male/female counts, the gap between these numbers shrank. So stories that were "male" became slightly less male, and stories that were "female" became slightly less female. One story barely changed at all, the gap changed by one point. The last one skewed more masculine. But only by about 50 points. Whereas most of the others when they changed moved by several hundred points towards the center.
Looks like my editing process tries to reign things in a little. Either that, or their specific words are often among those that I try to weed out.
On other writing news, I'm taking a stab at writing a few articles for my writing group newsletter. I managed to get a few drafts done last night, so even though no new fiction has been worked on yet, I did get a couple thousand words written. It's a nice contrast to write a little non-fiction in the meantime. In the wings, I'm sketching out some changes to make for my next revision. Which I would have tackled as well, if I had realized that I was going to have more free time last night than I originally expected. But hindsight and all that.
So I had about 10 first drafts to compare. What I found was, to me at least, interesting. In eight out of ten cases, the edited stories when compared to their first drafts became more neutral. That is, when you compared the male/female counts, the gap between these numbers shrank. So stories that were "male" became slightly less male, and stories that were "female" became slightly less female. One story barely changed at all, the gap changed by one point. The last one skewed more masculine. But only by about 50 points. Whereas most of the others when they changed moved by several hundred points towards the center.
Looks like my editing process tries to reign things in a little. Either that, or their specific words are often among those that I try to weed out.
On other writing news, I'm taking a stab at writing a few articles for my writing group newsletter. I managed to get a few drafts done last night, so even though no new fiction has been worked on yet, I did get a couple thousand words written. It's a nice contrast to write a little non-fiction in the meantime. In the wings, I'm sketching out some changes to make for my next revision. Which I would have tackled as well, if I had realized that I was going to have more free time last night than I originally expected. But hindsight and all that.
