The essence of a draft is that it is never finished. This being “in process” is what gives a draft its value. Because a draft is perpetually in transit, working with drafts works well with walking. In fact, I would say that a walking methodology necessitates seeing one’s body of work as a perpetual draft.
References
Scandura, Jani. “The Matter of Drafts.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by Paula Rabinowitz, Oxford University Press, 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.205
Because the draft lays no claims to perfection, finishedness, or closure, its terrain is always in medias res. Yet the nature and value of its unfinishedness depends upon the cultural or historical milieu in which it is considered.
Marta L. Werner argues that the modern manuscript is a species “in- between,” no longer insisting on the “adamant materiality of its medieval predecessor,” but not yet “materialized into the immaterial traces common to post-print culture” of the late 20th and 21st centuries.
In other words, what is valued as manuscript—and even more so the draft not the fair copy—is that it remains in process. It is perhaps the “in-process” and serial quality that ultimately defines the modern literary draft and endows it with auratic value, whether that draft has been produced as a handwritten manuscript, typescript, or digital .doc.