The Lifecycle of a Novel Draft

This article’s aim is to teach you how to draft a novel. That’s a pretty vague statement and begs a lot of questions. What’s a draft? What work or planning do you have to do before you start drafting? Can you just sit down and start putting pen to paper and expect a draft to miraculously show up? How many drafts do you need to write in order to get a “finished” novel?

First and foremost, a draft is simply a version of a manuscript, and there will be many versions along the way to a finish novel ready for publication (or whatever other plans you have for it). The purpose of a first draft is to bring your story kicking and screaming into existence—nothing more. It has to exist before your story can be molded and perfected into its final form. You have to start somewhere, and you also need a blank canvas on which to discover your story, a place where anything is possible and anything can happen. You may have a vision in your head, but you don’t know what might happen along the way or exactly what the final result will look like.

A draft is like a prototype or an alpha or beta version of an app or video game before it's officially released. Before you can release it to the world, you have get an idea, design a prototype, create an at least somewhat functional first version, get feedback and work out the bugs, then decide on the final version and declare it finished. That’s a lot of steps and a very particular order. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself or try to skip steps in the process, but that can cause frustration, writer’s block, and even self-doubt.

But drafting doesn’t have cause any of those things. Let’s break down the process:

This might seem obvious, but what’s the point of laboring for months or years on a story if it’s not an idea that excites you? I’ve thrown out a lot of ideas because they were too cliche, too far beyond my ability to write at the time, or simply because I didn’t love them. That’s perfectly OK! You don’t have to write the first idea for a novel that comes to mind. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Take the time to discover a truly great idea you’re passionate about sharing with the world, because that’s the novel you’ll be the most likely to stick with and finish.

This may be the most important part of the drafting process. Even though story development isn’t technically prose that will end up in your novel, I still consider it part of the drafting or pre-drafting process. I can’t draft without developing the story first, and there have been countless time when I’m halfway through developing an idea and realize it just won’t work. Sometimes I’m able to fix the plot holes in the development stage and go on to complete the story, and sometimes I realize the idea just isn’t workable and have to give up on it. But it’s way better to realize this ten pages into an outline than 40,000 words into a draft.

Once you have a plot worked out and you know your story won’t fall apart halfway through, it’s time for your pen to hit the paper. In my case, literally. This year I wrote an approximately 50K word draft in under two months longhand with fountain pens. It can be done, but it takes discipline, dedication, and sheer willpower. 

Let’s cover some things that hold back progress as well as some tricks to blazing through a draft like a race horse on steroids. 

There are plenty of other things to avoid, and the list will be different for different types of people, but these are some of the biggest hurdles to my productivity.

So what should you do while drafting? The truth is, you only need to embrace three essential concepts in order to draft like a racehorse:

You’ll never hear a productive—or dare I say “successful”—writer say, “Oh, I write whenever I feel like it and magically produce diamond-studded drafts every time my fingers hit the keyboard.” That’s not reality, and realizing this is the first step to helping yourself become more productive. But the practical ways to realize these three fundamentals take a lot of discipline and brain training. Here are some things that have helped me:

Things to Do While Drafting:

Write every day. This. Is. Crucial. Yes, it’s OK to skip a day when life gets crazy, but it’s not as challenging as you might believe to write every day once you train yourself to do it, and it’s absolutely necessary to making real progress. 

Find a place (or several places) where you can concentrate and focus 100% on your writing and nothing else for a solid chunk of time—at least one hour but as much as four if you can. More than four straight hours of story-immersion is a bit draining on the brain in my experience, and you want to set yourself up for success rather than failure. Find the amount of time that works best for you and commit to making that time to write.

Practice jumping into your story and into writing mode as often as possible, even in distracting places. You have to train your brain to start writing as soon as you pick up a pen or put your fingers to a keyboard. You can do this by opening your notebook or text editor an immediately start writing something, even if it’s the first thing that pops into your head. Just go with it and force yourself to get into the story and the flow of words. It’s OK to write crap because you’ll be revising it later, anyhow. You literally have nothing to lose, so just do it. 

Having twenty minutes or even twenty seconds to “get in the mood” isn’t a luxury you can afford very often, so training yourself to jump into writing mode at a moment’s notice will help you stay as productive as possible even when you don’t have much time. Any time can be useable if you know how to make the most of it, even standing in line waiting for hot buns at a popup.

Throw perfectionism to the wind and write whatever you want. Just because you have a detailed outline doesn’t mean you always have to stick to it exactly. Or if you don’t have a detailed outline, it’s OK to stop and plan the next few scenes or chapters of your story if an idea strikes you and you want to see where it might lead before drafting it. You'll make discoveries as you write, and you should explore them and go in any new direction that seems promising or a better solution than your first idea. The first draft is all about discovering your story—not perfecting it. So for the love of crunchy cheese curls, don’t go back and change anything that might be affected by your brilliant new ideas until after the draft is finished! 

Make notes and brainstorm as you go. How many times have you gotten stuck in the middle of a scene or just finished a chapter and not known exactly where to take the story next? No matter how well you plot and plan, you’ll have these moments. Instead of falling into the coma of writer’s block, start working it out immediately. Write down all the possibilities you can think of no matter how much some of them suck and you know you’d never actually use them in your story. Give yourself a chance to look at the problem from every angle and determine a solution that works. Most likely, if you just start brainstorming, something will reveal itself and you’ll be back to drafting in no time. 

But it’s OK if it takes a little while to come up with an idea. Don’t stare at a blank page or screen if you can’t will a solution into existence—go do something else. Sometimes your subconscious needs you to focus on a menial task for a while so it can work on the problem in the background and kick you in the brain with a brilliant idea right as you’re about to fall asleep.

There are plenty of other tips and tricks out there for writing a first draft with all the speed and fury of Thor’s hammer, but these are the ones that have worked the best and most consistently for me. Check my article How to Write a First Draft Without Perfectionism for more.

Once your first draft is finished and you’ve written the beautiful, glorious words “THE END,” then and only then should you consider sharing your work with others for the shake of beta reading, feedback, and critique. This doesn’t mean you can’t have writing buddies who know your story and you can toss ideas around with as you write. But no one needs the pressure of prying eyes as they literally bring a story into existence out of thin air. That’s challenging enough as it is without having to consider anyone else’s opinion. So don’t. Create the prototype, then find beta testers. That’s the natural order of things.

Consider all feedback and advice carefully, but learn to discern between good ideas you should actually act upon and opinions that may not be consistent with the vision you have for your work. But definitely be willing to make any change that you truly believe will make your story better—even if it means cutting out parts you love or tackling subjects you might at first want to avoid.

Don’t let the seeming simplicity of this step fool you. It’s easily the most time-consuming part of the drafting process. You may have to rewrite your story entirely or edit it until the first draft is barely recognizable three draft later, but this is the rewarding part. Watching your raw gem be cut and polished into a shining diamond should make anyone proud.

This can be the most agonizing part of process. How do you know when you’ve revised and edited enough, when you’ve gotten enough feedback to cover every possible opinion, when you can finally declare that you’ve reached your “final draft”? The short answer is never. Given enough time, you could edit your story countless times and likely still not be satisfied enough to call it finished. 

That’s not the goal. The goal is to create a story that will entertain and maybe even encourage or enlighten others. Your work can’t do that if you hang on to it forever in the hopes of making it perfect. Nothing is perfect, but good enough can be pretty damn good. Once your story is as good as it can be (either because you feel that it is or because enough people tell you that it is), it’s time to move on to the next step and let it out into the world.

That’s why you wrote your novel in the first place, right? To share it either through publication of some kind or with friends and family. Once you make it this far, your story is ready to see the light of day! It’s been in the dark corner of your hard drive or the recesses of a Google doc for long enough. Let it go and move on to the next thing.

As Andy Warhal so wisely said, “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” 

Now pat yourself on the back for a job well done and start drafting your next story!