What is a draft?

I mean that sincerely.

And I mean it as a frame challenge. Advice about numbers of drafts and other rules about writing usually comes from pretty old advice that doesn't apply so much anymore. If it ever did.

Back when I was in primary school, a draft was what you wrote on a fresh sheet of paper. You then marked it up until it was unreadable and wrote it out clean. That was your next draft.

In secondary school, I had a typewriter, though I did a lot by hand too. A draft was the same, only typed, with handwritten corrections.

I didn't have a computer until well into college, and mostly not until grad school. Up to the present day. The idea of a draft has lost much of its meaning. I revise a lot. I write up a chapter and feel that it's done. Sometimes my husband reads it and comments and I make changes if needed. Sometimes I print it out to read to my critique group, then make changes based on their comments. Other times I just re-read it and tweak stuff. Often I make revisions on chapters before I'm done writing them. I couldn't even begin to give you a number of "drafts" I've done. One? Fifty?

A draft often means something you turn in to a teacher.

If you're in a class, you might be asked to turn in a first draft and any number of subsequent drafts, then the final copy. This isn't because X number of drafts is what writers need. It's your teacher's way of making sure you're progressing and not saving all the work for the last minute.

I've done it myself when I taught college students to write essays. I didn't care if the first draft was an outline or a skeleton essay or a fleshed out portion of the essay with nothing else done. I just wanted to see work. If I asked for a second draft, I simply wanted to see more work than the first draft. It was also a way to make sure the student chose a workable topic and was on track.

Sometimes a draft gets a new number because you've hit a deadline.

My first draft is always what I end up with when I'm done with the chapter (I'm not yet done with my novel, so I don't have a first draft of it yet). I could call what I give to my critique group my second draft. And so on. It's pretty arbitrary.

The important take-away is that you rethink, rework, and revise.

The numbers don't matter. No one will be watching to see if you revise the entire work at once or if you focus on certain bits. So long as you understand that it's rare to have an entire work just right the first time and that you put in the work to make it better.

The last step is proofreading.

However many drafts come before, and however you count them or make them happen, once you're satisfied with your work, the very last step is to proofread. Not yourself, mind you. You've already done that. But by an outsider. This isn't beta reading, which is editing or critique by outside people, and will have been part of your editing/drafting process.

Is it done yet?

Maybe. Maybe not. Depends what you do with it next.

---

(0)

Login to post a comment!