How many drafts does it take?
(Spoiler: A lot)
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Dear Kate,
How many drafts of your books do you usually write, on average, before they’re published? Do you have a ballpark number you recommend?
- Editing
Dear Editing,
The joke number of drafts is ten million and the serious answer is pretty close to ten million, too. There’s no set number I can point to or recommend because it varies per person and per book, and because I write so many drafts that after a certain point it’s not meaningful for me to keep track of the number. I can tell you this, though:
It’s a lot.
It’s more than you’d think, and way more than I used to expect. It’s more than it feels like it “should” take (“why didn’t I get this right the first time around???”). But I can also tell you that it’s always been worth the time it takes to get there.
I have BIG PUBLISHING NEWS that I can’t share yet, but just KNOW THAT I AM SCREAMING ON THE INSIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Publishers make you wait to announce a deal because…I don’t know why. Because publicity begins with the first announcement, so they care about the timing and delivery of it? I don’t know if I’m supposed to keep this vague news that there even is news to myself but please join me in a quiet scream, too!)
I’m going back through my files and the book that will be coming out sometime in 2025 started as a kernel of a short story in 2020, and it looks like I began writing the novel version in earnest, with a different title than its current one, in May of 2021. I write almost every day, and I do a lot of revising along the way. I consider something a new draft and not just another day’s work if it marks a substantial shift in the whole of the manuscript, versus a revision to specific sections or scenes. I have files for this novel saved as numbered drafts up to “TITLE_DATE_DRAFT 8” and then it looks like I stopped numbering each big draft after that. But I still did another year of writing, so “8 drafts” was only the beginning.
I always start with writing what I call a Draft 0. It’s not even a Draft 1—a full draft is too much pressure! Draft 0 is just a mess of words on the page and me trying to tell myself a story.
Then I revise that jumble into something with an actual beginning, middle, and end, that I can sit down and read from start to finish no matter how rough. That’s my messy Draft 1, but it’s still just me trying to figure out “What’s happening in this book? What’s it about?” Draft 2 is adding/cutting/rearranging scenes, still trying to get the right chunks in the right place.
Once I have all the pieces in the novel, and in the general right order, I start revising on the level of the scene. I don’t know how to explain these steps except to say I try to make them better. The language sharper, the dialogue more effective, the scenes punchier, the stakes higher, each moment more important. This is where the bulk of my revision occurs. I do this over and over and over. I revise until I hit the end of the novel. Then I go back and do it again.
Sometimes I have specific notes to myself for each draft—things I know I need to do. Sometimes I’m just reading and rereading to discover along the way what I need to address. This is the piece that takes the longest and that I think a lot of beginning writers skip. It’s what takes a book from decent and even good to, hopefully, even better and maybe even great. Working and working and working. Putting in the time.
Along the way I send these drafts to trusted readers to get an outside opinion, and those opinions inform my revisions as I continue to work. I don’t send my drafts 0 or 1 to anyone; those are just for me. Probably around my third or fourth draft is when I start to think, okay, this is a book-shaped thing now and I need someone else’s perspective. I get an opinion and I revise and then I get another opinion. This isn’t revising-by-committee, but neither is it one-and-done. Revising something changes the story. It creates a chain reaction in which other things change, too. Fixing one thing in the narrative means in my next read I’m likely to notice something else instead. If you don’t give yourself the time to go through those versions, you work on the most obvious things but you never get to that deeper level where you can do even more.
Side note: this process all assumes that my outline + Draft 0 started off pointing me in the right direction, and that all my subsequent drafts successfully build upon it. Sometimes, though, revising can look like continuing to spin your tires in the same muddy ruts. You keep fixing the scenes and revising the sentences but on some basic level the book still doesn’t work. In this case, my answer is to step outside the version that you have and try to approach it differently. I think of this as getting all the way out of those tire tracks to make a brand new path. I’ve done this and it sucks, but it’s also the only way to stop making the same mistakes over and over—making revisions that change the manuscript but don’t actually improve it.
All of these revisions I’m talking about took place before I sent the manuscript to my agent. My agent and I then did a full year of revisions together on this novel of mine that’s going to be an actual book you’ll be able to hold in your hands in two years. It’s a thorny and complicated story and the market is BRUTAL right now and we knew this had to be really, really ready for editors in order to get that elusive yes we were striving for. (And a book can be really, really ready and still not get a yes.) We did probably three or four rounds of edits together, which doesn’t include, again, the revisions I did on my own between versions I sent to her. I rewrote the final scene six times. I spent days and I don’t know how many drafts just rewriting the first page.
I share this not to say that you need six last chapters, but to give an honest picture of what revision can look like. And now, after all of those revisions, the book is with an editor who’s going to give me more revisions. We’ve already discussed her notes and they’re ideas that made me think yes and why didn’t I think of that and holy cow this woman GETS this book and is going to make it even better. So even when a book is “done” and ready to go to agents, it will be revised. When it’s “done” and ready to go to editors, it will be revised. When it’s published and out in the world, there will be things you’ll look back at and say “Damn, I wish I’d done _____.” Even though by that time it’s out of your hands and you’ll have moved on to a new project.
My romance novels went through a similar process. Writing and revising until I’d taken the manuscript as far as I could on my own, and then more rounds with my editor. Sometimes this meant cutting whole scenes and adding new ones. Sometimes we jumped right into fine-tuning. You have to listen to each book and what it’s telling you it needs, without imposing some external idea on how you think the process should go. You learn from each book lessons you can apply to the next one. But also, each manuscript is its own, unique experience.
It can be scary to send out your work and tempting to hold onto it forever, telling yourself you need to keep revising. At a certain point though you have to let go and test the waters, knowing you’ve taken your work as far as you can—for now—and are ready to find out what’s next. (See my post on facing rejection and sending out your work.) But I think you’re asking, Editing, about how long you should spend in this editing stage—not how do you know when it’s time to take that next step. And my answer is to not worry about how many drafts is “normal” or how many versions other people do. Trust your own writing and your own process. Work on this book until the number of drafts no longer matters. Work until the writer you are now no longer recognizes the writer you were when you started.
When it feels truly finished, put it aside for a few months, start something new, and come back and reread your manuscript with fresh eyes. When it feels like you’ve read it enough and can’t possibly go through it again…reread it again, and keep going.
Good luck!
Kate