How Many Drafts?

How many drafts does it take to finish a book? Is there an ideal number? And what counts as a ‘completed’ draft?

My previous post on editing barely scratched the surface.  There are different types of editing and multiple draft of the work can be produced from each stage. Every author’s editing process is different. And I’ve dramatically changed mine for the current project.

I thought my new process would be faster. But it’s also way more thorough. So it’s slower.

And that’s the challenge: the quality of the work versus the time to publication. How many drafts until you know it’s the best it can be? How many drafts until you know it’s fit to publish?

Louise Harnby outlines the different stages of novel editing. But these are seldom ‘one-and-done’ edits.

At the Developmental Editing stage, changes to story beats, structure and character arcs can generate multiple drafts. From the ‘Big Picture’ edit, you dive into chapters and scenes. Developmental or story editing will generate multiple drafts. Only when you arrive at a satisfying, coherent story, should you move on.

You hope the later stages of line editing, copy editing and proofreading need only one pass and one draft each. But that isn’t always true. A long manuscript may need multiple passes to pick up every change. And still we have typos and inconsistencies in published books.

What qualifies as ‘a draft?’

How many times should you hit ‘Save As…’ and generate a new file with a new version number? How many changes go into each draft until you call it a significant break-point? And I don’t mean the writer’s paranoia about backing up manuscripts hourly, daily, or on a whim.

What determines when Draft One is finished and Draft Two is now the work in progress? It’s easier in line editing, copy editing and proofreading when each pass through the whole manuscript counts as a draft. But developmental editing can be Editing Hell. Painful and never-ending.

What happens when you need to undo a raft of changes? Character arcs or plot points that don’t work? Do you have a string of prior versions to wind back? Or is there a soup of colored lines when you view tracked changes in the document? Do you even use Track Changes in your document?

My Editing Hell

I have a loose and probably unhealthy notion of a completed draft. That’s where I thrash around trying to establish genre, tone and, most importantly, character. Their goals, motivations and obstacles. Their choices, decisions and reactions. Then tie together the plot points that make a coherent story of all that material.

Sometimes a developmental draft goes on for months. Which is fine as long as I’m moving forward: if I can call every edit an improvement.

When do I call halt on the developmental edits? When I stop picking at character, plot and story beats and get annoyed with poor description, bad word choices and clunky sentences. Then I know it’s time to move on. But that’s not a clear line in the sand.

As for the rest? I’ve just finished a chapter-by-chapter line-edit. I made hundreds of changes. I also spotted new patterns of garbage in my prose, so I need to run another full-manuscript edit of Crutch Words before I do another line-edit.

How many drafts are there in a finished manuscript? I’ll let you know.