How many drafts? Definitely more than zero...
Today, after considerable striving, I finished one of the many readthroughs I am doing on The Novel. This was one part of a raft of edits, which together constitute a third draft - more details on those here if you're interested - and I'm hopefully within a week or two of finishing the whole damn lot. After that, I may let some other people read it.
The whole draft-counting system is a very personal thing really - you'd think the criteria for a first, second and third draft would be easy to define, but in reality you might as well ask a writer to define the concept of being. In fact, that might be quicker. (But I would say that, I have a Philosophy degree.)
In general, I'll use whatever approach works for me at the time. One numbering idiosyncrasy I've never quite found a use for, though, is Draft Zero.
Read more »
