For a first draft the record for me is six hours, one day. But it was pretty bare, mostly just a hashing out of thoughts, characters, plot and point of view. I mostly write short fiction all the way through before I start to revise, that way I know what it is I have to play with in order to nail the ending. Finding the right ending for the six hour draft took much longer and ultimately meant abandoning a lot of what originally came before it. But I think that’s the point of a first draft. It’s just getting all the raw material out and on the page, because the real work comes when you got to put on your hip waders and slosh around in it for a while in order to make it into something worth showing to a reader.

I break down writing a first draft into three processes: 1) Gathering ideas and phrases in notebooks 2) Transcribing the notes into something coherent, and 3) marking up paper copies with improvements and new directions. The only reason I think of it that way is I love the first and third processes, and the second feels like a trip to the dentist. I pretty much revise to the point where no issues stand out before I consider a first draft completed and I'm ready to show people. Often a first draft will just become the background for another piece or an experiment in form and style and never see the light of day.

Yes same for me. Because I live in L.A. first drafts usually start for me somewhere while I'm driving so I have to jot a quick note down on a pad or my black berry or somewhere then sometime later when I'm still that note becomes a story and then sometime much later that story becomes its potential.

i write it all the way through. most short stories start as flash fictions of sometimes only 100-200 words length, which i publish here and here. the feedback i get (often offline) helps me build momentum and focus. once i'm done with the first draft, i usually give it to my wife, who help me sound less germanic (she's an editor and a native speaker). when i'm less sure about a story, i translate this draft into german and then translate it back to english after a week or so.

Nice, six hours is impressive. I agree; I usually just write when a story (for shorts) hits my head and I am close to a computer. These first drafts of mine are horrendous and I can only see it if I let it cool off for a couple days. Reworking it on the same day has proven to be a helpless cause. How many edits (or how long) does it take before you feel it's good enough to share with the world?