The Purpose of Each Draft

A breakdown of drafts 1-4 and what I focused on for each

Writing a book doesn’t just mean you sit down, write a book, and you’re done. Writing is rewriting. It requires multiple drafts. And each draft has its own purpose. I’m currently on the fourth draft of my book, and I wanted to share what I focused on in each draft so far to help me develop my story into the most well rounded version it can be.

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Draft 1

The purpose of the first draft is to discover your story.

It’s all about figuring things out along the way. You’re getting to know your characters, seeing how they interact with each other, uncovering different themes, and playing around with scenes.

Sure, you may have some idea of where your story will go (or a lot if you're a big plotter), but I guarantee things will go in unexpected directions at some point or another. And that’s OK. That’s part of the process.

The biggest mindset shift for me was realizing that the first draft was the garbage draft. This allowed me to just write in a stream of consciousness style where I threw everything out onto the page. It was like one big brain dump.

I honestly don’t think this draft would have made sense to anyone besides myself, but that was fine, because I wasn’t planning on showing it to anyone. It was just for me, myself, and I.

I didn’t allow myself to go back and edit or reread anything, so I was able to write the first draft pretty fast. I typically wrote one chapter (2,000ish words) a night, and was done in about 2 months.

Developing this garbage draft mindset was a game changer. It got me to actually complete an entire draft when I had never been able to before. So if you’re having writers block or just can’t finish a draft to save your life, try implementing this mindset. Allow your writing to be shit.

Draft 2

At the end of the first draft, I knew my characters and story a lot better, but it was one giant mess.

That’s where draft 2 came in. The developmental edit. This was honestly the most brutal draft for me (at least so far), because I had to wrangle the dumpster fire of a first draft into a cohesive story. There were so many plot holes in it, and now I had to actually fix them. And I didn’t know how to.

While the purpose of the first draft is to discover the story, the second draft’s purpose is to get the story right. It’s about sifting through everything and figuring out what the heart of your book is so that you can focus on that. Keep whatever moves the story forward, and delete the rest.

Something that really helped me determine what was essential was making a chaptered outline. Basically, I just summed each chapter up in a few bullet points so I could get a birdseye view of the entire book. Doing this, I was able to more easily see what pieces were working and what needed to shift.

I also got feedback on my chaptered outline from an editor. They pulled it apart and pointed out all the things that weren’t working, which helped me figure out how I should approach draft 2.

I ended up deleting an entire plot thread and main character, because there was just too much going on. I couldn’t do it all justice in such a short amount of words. I also moved a few chapters around, deleted some, and added others.

So yeah. It was chaos. It took me about five months to complete this draft, but only because I was writing a ton every day. It probably would have taken me over a year if I’d been going at a more reasonable pace.

Draft 3

The third draft was my character draft, where I focused on fleshing out my characters by smoothing out their arcs and aligning their personalities.

In the first two drafts I had still been discovering exactly who my characters were. But by the third draft, I felt like I had a decent enough understanding of them. So I now had to go through and make sure they were doing and saying things that aligned with who they truly were.

This required me to rewrite a lot of the dialogue, because my characters were often interacting in ways that weren’t consistent to their personalities. But the good news was that the dialogue came more easily in this draft. It was almost like the characters wrote it for me. They had things they wanted to say, so I just listened.

The character that really needed fleshing out in draft 3 was my male main character. I wanted to create a clear arc for him where he was flawed at the beginning and changed by the end. To do this, I added several snippets in the first half of the book to showcase his flaw more, so it was clear how he was changing throughout the story.

It’s important to take readers along the journey of your characters. Show their transformation slowly happening so that it’s more satisfying when they’ve finally grown by the end.

Draft 4

The fourth draft is the line editing draft. It’s about improving the quality of a book at the sentence level. And that doesn’t mean making it sound pretty by including lots of flowery prose. In fact, it actually means the exact opposite.

You shouldn’t be trying to impress the reader with your writing. You should instead be trying to make it effortless. Readers shouldn’t have to work hard to read your book. A book that flows smoothly and is easy to read is a well written book.

Think of how you can get the same meaning across in the fewest amount of words possible. Then do that. This could mean deleting words/sentences, combining the most important parts of sentences together, or rewriting them entirely.

Another aspect I’m focusing on in draft four is making sure the structure of each chapter is good. I’m checking to see that there’s a proper mix of interiority, dialogue, actions, scenery descriptions, etc., so that it all flows together well. If there’s too much of one thing, or not enough of another, it can affect the pacing.

Really, the whole point of this draft is flow. You want to make things flow as smoothly as possible so the reader doesn’t have to think while they’re reading and can instead just get lost in the story.

Future Drafts

There are still plenty more drafts to come once I finish the fourth draft, and they’ll each have their own purpose, too. I think it’s important to have a focus for each draft, otherwise you can go in circles and make the story worse rather than better.

Editing can sometimes feel like a lot, but the good news is that typically each draft gets a bit easier and doesn’t need as much work. So just focus on the current draft and take it one step at a time. Eventually you’ll have a finished, well-rounded, polished manuscript.

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What draft are you currently working on? What is its focus? Let me know in the comments!