How many drafts do you write before the book is finished?

I’ve never had a satisfactory answer to this question. My answer has also changed quite a bit between when I started writing and now. It’ll probably change in the future, too.

The first draft, the raw draft of dumping words on the page, goes into Scrivener. Though I still fuss with sentences, I keep Scrivener in Full Screen mode and do as little jumping away from the text as possible. If I give a character a name at the start of the chapter and forget what it is by the end of the chapter, I won’t scroll up to look for it. Their name becomes TK WHAT DID I NAME THIS PERSON until my first editing pass.

I think most people know this, but: TK is a journalism convention, marking a place in the text for future edits. It’s an easy way to note things to come back to. I use it primarily for details, though I also use it as a stylistic reminder. Sometimes I’ll finish a paragraph and realize I conveyed none of the feeling I intended to, or that I wrote a hundred words of cliches rather than something simple and true. There’s nothing wrong with ending a fresh paragraph with TK THIS SUCKS REVISE LATER. Better to do that and prove that you knew it wasn’t working at the time than to come back to it and wonder what you were thinking six months ago.

When I reach the end, I’ll go back and fill in all of the TKs. I suppose this is technically the second draft, but there are rarely substantial changes in content over the first draft. Still, this is the earliest draft I could show to another human being and expect them to follow.

After letting it sit for three to six months, I take this draft back out. If I was paying attention as I was writing it, I will usually have a rough sense of what needs to be fixed – what scenes need to be completely rewritten, what chapters need to be rearranged, what could be tightened up. If I don’t know what’s wrong already – and there’s always something wrong – I try writing a synopsis of the story from memory. If I forget what happens between certain key scenes, or if I remember something happening different than it did, or if I sum up something in a sentence that took two chapters to recount, that tells me where I need to work.

At this point, I have a draft I’m comfortable sharing with trusted readers. I reach out to see who’s available, solicit their feedback, and compile their notes. Generally, if I get the same note from multiple people, or if I get pointed feedback on something that’s key to the story, I focus my attention there.

With these edits in place, I work with a professional editor for another pass. This is where narrative inconsistencies, stylistic hiccups, and grammar issues get ironed out. These are also, frankly, a pain, because I have to export a file from Scrivener into Word, review feedback in Word, and then put all those changes back into Scrivener. But my day job’s taught me the importance of making copy changes to the source file, not just the final export.

Once these edits are done, I export from Scrivener to a Kindle-readable format. Then I load the book onto my Kindle and read the whole thing again. Each different view of the text – on the screen vs. on the printed page vs. on the Kindle – uncovers new things. It’s a matter of how the text gets juxtaposed. You’ll never know how many times you use the same odd word choice in the same paragraph unless you format that paragraph a couple of different ways. Any changes I find here, I make in Scrivener. Again.

What emerges from that could be called the “final” draft. But even then, probably up until the day of release, I’ll be finding little bits and pieces to tweak. At some point, every writer needs to wash their hands of a draft and submit it to the world’s attention. But another thing I picked up from my day job is to label drafts by their date, not by their order. Call nothing final until you die.

And there may be one or two more revisions within that cycle. This is the great challenge of producing viable art. You have to take something that inspired you, grind it over and over until you’re sick of looking at it, then give it one final polish.

“No amount of assertion made an ounce of art,” wrote Saul Bellow. Art emerges from labor: refinement, revision, scrapping first drafts and stripping away excess. If there’s not a revision period, it’s not art, it’s play (also valuable, but hardly marketable). Revision is the most important part of my writing – and, for me, the hardest.