How Many Drafts Are Enough?

[Music] the best way to improve a book is to rewrite it a second draft is always better than a first a third better than a second writing and rewriting a book what we call drafting is crucial to a project's success but one which rarely gets attention we can talk character arcs and act structure all day outlining verse discovery and so forth but how often do we think about our drafts our process and purpose for them do they simply exist to try the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result or do they have meaning all on their own more importantly how many is too many how do we know when we're done i start new drafts with a completely blank page i take the old version of the project and toss it aside ignoring everything that came before that may sound extreme but there's a method to the madness when i started writing i approached new drafts as improvements on the old draft rather than as a replacement for them over time i discovered this caused the new draft to pass through the same old ruts as the previous one improvements were made to prose and pacing but any core failures of the story would remain the only way i was able to break free from this was to set out in a completely new direction forgetting about everything that came before i now start new drafts with both a blank page and with blank assumptions who are my characters what is this world which story are we telling these are the questions i ask myself when starting a new project and i make sure to ask them again whenever i start a new draft now admittedly i often arrive at the same conclusions but the exercise is an important part of challenging our assumptions of identifying areas that need improvement it's like putting armor on the parts of the plane that don't have holes in it by foregoing all previous assumptions i'm free to change aspects of the story even if those elements are crucial pieces of the story's foundation this can be really challenging to do if you're constantly glancing at the previous draft attempting to polish something doomed to failure instead of starting from scratch to give one example i have this character in trial of atlas he's a reporter named cobb i struggled with that character in every draft i wrote i just couldn't seem to get him right relying too heavily on the previous draft would have caused me to waste time polishing a version of the character i didn't like but by questioning my assumptions and starting with a blank page i free myself to change basic fundamental aspects of the character in search of a better story in each draft his backstory changed his personality and outlook on life changed sure every draft had a reporter named cobb because i needed a reporter and cobb's as good a name as any but by starting with no assumptions as to what the story should be i freed myself to the possibility of what the story could be mixing and matching features until i found a combination that worked i do this with every aspect of the narrative it's not uncommon for me to drop entire chapters between drafts or add new ones characters subplots even major story arcs can change the drafting process isn't about getting the previous attempt right it's about discovering what the story is each time with a deeper understanding of the material that's a lot easier to do when starting from a blank canvas rather than trying to add additional layers over an old painting so how does starting from a blank page each time lead to structure doing something over and over again is a process but not a very orderly one wouldn't starting from scratch make it difficult to discern progress to determine if we're improving at all this is one of those places where experience comes into play not just for your writing but who you are as a writer for me personally i tend to write around five drafts per project i don't set out to write five drafts and sometimes i write more and sometimes i write less but five tends to be the right number for me more importantly there is a structure to these five traps i'm not just writing draft one five times i'm isolating and nailing down important parts of the story with each draft those five drafts consist of three core drafts and two polished drafts each one centered around a specific goal with an increasing amount of the story locked in as each draft progresses for the three core drafts i begin as we discussed above completely blank page no assumptions now as we talked about in the writing process video i'm a heavy outliner and i do use previous drafts as a guide when outlining the next one i'll also read through the scenes in the previous draft to determine which are working and where and how i want to make improvements to the scenes i'm keeping over the years i have noticed that each of these core drafts have their own focus even if it's subconscious i think there's this temptation when we sit down to write that we have to capture the whole story in its entirety the first time we have to capture everything the story is was and will be in this draft as though it were the final product we have this expectation that we can sit down write the story out in final form and then fix it with a little proofreading and editing i have discovered in my now what almost like 13 years of writing that i rarely work this way this is another reason why i start with a completely blank page it helps me avoid the easy trap of getting caught up and trying to fix prose or pacing but what i should be focused on is plot character and other major defects lying beneath the surface each of these three core drafts centers around a fundamental part of the story my first draft tends to be heavily targeted towards plot of making sure the base structural elements are in place this does have some downsides personally i've always struggled with characters starting with broad often one-dimensional characters or archetypes and fleshing them out in later giraffes and i think it's this drafting process that is responsible it's because in the first draft i'm not focused on them i'm focused on the plot the second draft is then when i do most of the character work i may start with a blank page but i'm likely to return to a lot of the conclusions i drew the first time through including major plot beats and overall story major chapters story arcs etc may be jettisoned between the two drafts but the broad strokes the parts that survive to the second time around essentially become locked in allowing me to focus on harder issues like character fleshing them out and making sure they fit well within the story by the time i get to a third draft most of the story beats and characters are locked the story starting to resemble its ultimate form characters overall chapters world building and the like become less likely to change with each subsequent draft some chapters can still be moved around major character arcs shifted in the pacing but much of the story has become fixed into place this third draft then focuses on making sure the pacing is where i want it to be character arcs flow nicely and each chapter is to the quality i expect even if the individual scenes within those chapters are still shaky then comes the polishing stage which usually runs me about two drafts once i reach the polishing part of the process the story is effectively content locked the characters chapters major plot points world building and so on are unlikely to change from here on out i still start with a blank page but i'm no longer asking myself those fundamental questions each draft circles tighter and tighter towards the ultimate goal narrowing in scope and increasing with speed in the fourth draft i am no longer focused on the broader elements and instead start to focus on making the story the best possible version of itself it can be i'm no longer worried about where a chakra should go or if that chapter is good enough instead i'm focusing on scenes within the chapter rather than the chapter themselves anything within a scene is fair game to be changed or tossed out as needed but the overall beats of the scene and the positioning within the story are pretty static by this point thus some of the material you read in the so-called final copy may actually be first pass no different than a first draft the quality however is drastically improved because we've spent each preceding draft getting more and more experience with this story the final acts of proofreading and editing smooth out the cracks so the reader doesn't notice which parts are new and which parts have been there since the actual first draft the fifth and hopefully final draft is where the spit and shine is applied by this point everything except the pros is locked in place this draft only serves as a chance to polish each line to punch up the pros fix typos and correct editing mistakes along the way if this process sounds familiar to you that's probably because you're picking up on the parallels between how i write and how video games are made thanks largely to marketing the general public are familiar with the game being an alpha or beta while these terms have largely been co-opted by marketing their original meaning is still important to development and relevant to how we approach our writing a video game has reached alpha when it is feature complete so for say mario that means there's a character and that character can jump and there are enemies and they can be jumped on it means there are levels and power ups a start menu and a game over screen a game reaches beta when it is asset complete assets are things like mario sprite the jumping animation sound effects music and all the other elements that make a game feel alive alpha alphas about features and functionality beta is about appearance and presentation after beta a game will go through a cycle of quality assurance revisions and bug fixes before finally going gold this is when the game is published so named because of these things called cds that used to exist the parallels to my drafting process is pretty plain my three core drafts are when i'm working towards alpha putting in the features of characters plot points and so on in the same way developers make levels and populate them with enemies the two polished drafts are me working towards beta and eventual release the assets get locked down the bugs get fixed until i feel the project has reached its final state and is ready for release [Music] by now hopefully the process is clear even if the number is not i can't simply write five drafts and expect to get the desired result the process is important it provides structure and stability to the project but the process can only lead to a result it can't make it so how do we determine when the project is done how can we tell how many drafts is enough for me it comes down to one of two terminal states i know a project is finished because i'm either satisfied with the thing i've made or i'm completely blind to it satisfaction has nothing to do with quality or perfection it's a subjective determination that can only be made by you the writer and can be affected by everything from time spent on the project to competing priorities or deadlines both rebuilding the executive and thrice dead witch are far from perfect i knew i was finished with them not because i reached some ideal state of narrative ascension but because i read through the draft and said for better or worse this is the book i set out to write sure i could spend another two years polishing and refining the manuscript over and over again but the cliff of diminishing returns is a short one and i have more books to write trial of alice on the other hand was a different story i wrote like six or seven drafts of that thing because i was never really satisfied with it so why did i put it out when i did it's because at a certain point with so many competing drafts in my head having spent so much time with the story i became noseblind to it you know how you don't know what you smell like or how you can sit at home all day not realizing anything's amiss but run out to the store or see a movie and detect some funky smell immediately upon walking in the door well the same thing happened to me with that book i could sit down and read it and have no response one way or another i was just used to it like saying the same word over and over again until it's lost all meeting now generally when this happens we put the book down we step away from it for a while even work on another project but i took months off in between drafts of trial of atlas working on rebuilding the executive and some other projects and when i came back to it i was still noseblind i reached a place where i simply couldn't think about the story anymore and time wasn't going to fix it so i put it out [Music] to sum everything up i typically write five drafts per project three core and two polish sometimes i write more core drafts and sometimes less depending on how happy i am with the result each draft has a focused goal with the drafts building off the work that came before it while still being free to change major aspects as needed each draft content locks more and more of the story until i feel satisfied enough that i can move into polishing the pros and fixing any typos and i put the book out either when i'm happy with the thing i've made or become so numb that i can't think about it anymore as a writer you should be constantly evaluating and re-evaluating your process from how you structure and outline a story to how you approach each draft it is absolutely vital to think about characters and act structures and all the other parts of storytelling but your process can be just as much a part of the puzzle the better we get at refining our skills the easier those next stories are going to be to write i'm mike aguero thanks for watching if you want to support the channel you can do so by picking up one of the books i mentioned in this video trial of atlas is a psychological thriller according to amazon's algorithm rebuilding the executive is a behind the curtain peak at the day-to-day functions of the executive branch and thrace dead witch is a fun sword and sorcery tale set in the universe of an epic fantasy i'm working on as always thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video assumptions assumptions assumptions [Music] and maxing features until i found the matching matching personality and quality of them it's about distorting [Music] does something there nope nope and i think this drafting process that chapter anything within a movement anything anything feature complete right animation to exist right to the end beta is about i was not recording [Music] the app provides no what happened what happened here can only be [Music] releasing the book out i [Music] okay all right you

Channel: Michael Aguero

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Id: JhP9HOEhTbo

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022