How many drafts are enough?
As promised last time, today I’m going to talk about the various drafts involved in writing a novel. At-least, I will try to share my opinion about what I feel about the tricky question that faces every author. How many drafts are enough?
So let’s start from the beginning and take this through
First Draft
Let me say upfront that First Draft is almost equivalent to shit.
Deep silence…
Well, maybe that was too harsh. But what could I say when the great Ernest Hemingway has said “First draft of everything is shit“. Technically speaking, it’s not as bad but first drafts are like the clay from which the true sculpture is crafted. Even though the clay is nothing but an incoherent mess but without it no good sculpture can be made.
First Drafts are the first connection to the parallel world where stories live. It is like creating something out of nothing. What I think is that one should not get discouraged if things don’t work out well enough in the first draft or if the writing sometimes looks like an utter mess. Just keep writing and keep aiming to finish the story when you feel dejected in the midst of writing the first draft. Without the first draft, there can be no second draft or the third draft. That is what I did with Starship Samudram even though I sometimes felt that it was not going as planned.
Second Draft
From my limited experience, I feel that second drafts are THE most important thing in the whole process of writing. It is where the seemingly incoherent first draft takes on a shape and form that might be appealing to the readers. This is where you cut out the weeds, re-arrange the plants, and trim them or grow them to make it better. This is where you write the real story.
If one has written the First Draft well enough then by the time the Second Draft starts, the characters will be almost like real people talking to you. Leverage that. Think about how the characters in the novel can interact with each other better, what is their depth, what have they experienced in this novel, and above all else, think about how you can improve it or make it more engaging for the readers. Can you re-arrange the scenes to make it more impactful? Can you cut down some characters or add certain new ones that might make more sense to the story?
The first draft of Starship Samudram was only 95K words. However, when I read my first draft from cover-to-cover, I could see so much potential for backstory, character interactions, re-structuring, and world building that I started re-writing everything. The second draft ended with almost 140K words. It was a dramatic increase of almost 50K words and I could say that none of that was repeated stuff. However, for some cases, it might also mean reducing the words and making the novel tighter.
Third Draft
For me, this is the editing phase. The careful trimming of content that does not impact the story but improves the writing further. This is where I normally try to tackle the weeds called adverbs, passive voice, typos and spellings that inadvertently creep into your initial drafts no matter how hard you try. Important thing is that you don’t change the story or any scenes in the third draft. You only work with what you already have. Because if you start changing stuff, you might get into a vicious cycle where you keep re-inventing the same story in different ways and not able to finish anything. Trust your work but only try to improve it in this draft and I think you’ll be good.
Fourth Draft
Is there even a Fourth Draft?
Yes, there might be. There might also be a 5th, 6th, 7th draft or as many as a writer believes is required to complete the work. But I feel they are more of the same and depends on how unsure a writer is about his work. For me, fourth draft only consists of corrections. When I completed the second draft for Starship Samudram, I believed it was a great story and moreover, it was complete.
I gave it to my test readers even while I worked on improvements in the third draft. Only thing I wanted from my test readers was whether they liked the story and whether they felt it made sense. I didn’t expect them to treat it like a literature masterpiece but atleast tell me whether it was interesting enough to read. Fourth Draft for me was to incorporate their suggestions if any or improve certain aspects of my work that I might’ve noticed during the couple of months it takes to reach from third draft to the fourth draft.
Now, all this does not mean that you can’t write with lesser number of drafts. But, this appears to me as the most logical number of drafts. However, as I gain more experience as a writer I might be able to finish something in two drafts. It also depends on the kind of story you are writing. Grand sci-fi with a huge number of characters might need a lot of pruning and re-structuring. Other types of stories might not. It all depends on the author in the end but the above can act as a rough blueprint.
Let me know what you feel about this topic and what is the optimum number of drafts you feel or have tried out in the past.
So let’s start from the beginning and take this through
First Draft
Let me say upfront that First Draft is almost equivalent to shit.
Deep silence…
Well, maybe that was too harsh. But what could I say when the great Ernest Hemingway has said “First draft of everything is shit“. Technically speaking, it’s not as bad but first drafts are like the clay from which the true sculpture is crafted. Even though the clay is nothing but an incoherent mess but without it no good sculpture can be made.
First Drafts are the first connection to the parallel world where stories live. It is like creating something out of nothing. What I think is that one should not get discouraged if things don’t work out well enough in the first draft or if the writing sometimes looks like an utter mess. Just keep writing and keep aiming to finish the story when you feel dejected in the midst of writing the first draft. Without the first draft, there can be no second draft or the third draft. That is what I did with Starship Samudram even though I sometimes felt that it was not going as planned.
Second Draft
From my limited experience, I feel that second drafts are THE most important thing in the whole process of writing. It is where the seemingly incoherent first draft takes on a shape and form that might be appealing to the readers. This is where you cut out the weeds, re-arrange the plants, and trim them or grow them to make it better. This is where you write the real story.
If one has written the First Draft well enough then by the time the Second Draft starts, the characters will be almost like real people talking to you. Leverage that. Think about how the characters in the novel can interact with each other better, what is their depth, what have they experienced in this novel, and above all else, think about how you can improve it or make it more engaging for the readers. Can you re-arrange the scenes to make it more impactful? Can you cut down some characters or add certain new ones that might make more sense to the story?
The first draft of Starship Samudram was only 95K words. However, when I read my first draft from cover-to-cover, I could see so much potential for backstory, character interactions, re-structuring, and world building that I started re-writing everything. The second draft ended with almost 140K words. It was a dramatic increase of almost 50K words and I could say that none of that was repeated stuff. However, for some cases, it might also mean reducing the words and making the novel tighter.
Third Draft
For me, this is the editing phase. The careful trimming of content that does not impact the story but improves the writing further. This is where I normally try to tackle the weeds called adverbs, passive voice, typos and spellings that inadvertently creep into your initial drafts no matter how hard you try. Important thing is that you don’t change the story or any scenes in the third draft. You only work with what you already have. Because if you start changing stuff, you might get into a vicious cycle where you keep re-inventing the same story in different ways and not able to finish anything. Trust your work but only try to improve it in this draft and I think you’ll be good.
Fourth Draft
Is there even a Fourth Draft?
Yes, there might be. There might also be a 5th, 6th, 7th draft or as many as a writer believes is required to complete the work. But I feel they are more of the same and depends on how unsure a writer is about his work. For me, fourth draft only consists of corrections. When I completed the second draft for Starship Samudram, I believed it was a great story and moreover, it was complete.
I gave it to my test readers even while I worked on improvements in the third draft. Only thing I wanted from my test readers was whether they liked the story and whether they felt it made sense. I didn’t expect them to treat it like a literature masterpiece but atleast tell me whether it was interesting enough to read. Fourth Draft for me was to incorporate their suggestions if any or improve certain aspects of my work that I might’ve noticed during the couple of months it takes to reach from third draft to the fourth draft.
Now, all this does not mean that you can’t write with lesser number of drafts. But, this appears to me as the most logical number of drafts. However, as I gain more experience as a writer I might be able to finish something in two drafts. It also depends on the kind of story you are writing. Grand sci-fi with a huge number of characters might need a lot of pruning and re-structuring. Other types of stories might not. It all depends on the author in the end but the above can act as a rough blueprint.
Let me know what you feel about this topic and what is the optimum number of drafts you feel or have tried out in the past.
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