I think that, by the time I send my manuscript off to the editor, it will have had at least ten drafts, give or take. It’s not that I mind; after all, it takes, however many it takes. And everyone’s drafting process is different too. Some people can get away with two or three drafts, and some need much more. But why is that?
It depends on how clean your first draft is. You will only rarely make a finished first draft, so don’t worry about getting it right immediately. Some people are able to edit as they go, and some people take their time perfecting it, which can make a huge difference. I suggest trying those methods later because it’s incredibly easy to get so caught up in perfection you don’t finish, but it is an option. But when you take your time to go through it, it helps make a nicer first draft, which is perfect for some people. My thought process has a hard time being so organized though. So I’m going to break down each step of Savior of the Damned.
Pre-writing: I did a bunch of scattered scenes that I would eventually weave into the body of the work itself
Rough draft: Only Phaedra’s POV, a good 1/3 was just a handful of scattered notes to fill in later, and I left a lot of places remarkably bare. A lot of “I have no idea, but I’ll come up with something” and “and then bad shit goes down” to keep me on track, and there are very few descriptions.
Draft .75: I wrote Eldren’s section, with a lot left bare or a couple sentences to fill in later
Draft 1: I went through and roughly filled in the scenes I skipped over
Draft 2: I went through and fleshed everything out
Draft 3: Line edits
Draft 4: Fixed grammar and spelling
Draft 5: Edits from my first round of readers
Draft 6: Edits from a latecomer to the beta reading who offered to help
Edit 7: housekeeping. Reducing the use of crutch words, deleting extraneous dialogue tags, making sure everything is streamlined, things like that.
So yeah, about ten drafts depending on how you break it all down. I struggle with executive dysfunction, and one of the problems it causes is that doing too much at once makes me freeze. But if I break it down into manageable chunks it’s a lot easier because I can focus on the current task at hand. If you add up just the time I spent working on it, it’s been less than a year. Because the steps are so small, I can breeze right through them, and so it took about six months (with a couple-month hiatus) to get it into the hands of its very first readers. Overall, I started this about July 2021 and of this writing it’s 2023 which is still pretty good.
I’m sure it will still need a bit of work after I get it back from my first editor. It’s just how things go. But that’s to be expected. I just wanted to show my process in case you’re thinking that it’s taking too long or you did something wrong. It takes however many drafts it takes to get a finished book, and that’s perfectly okay. You’ll also streamline your process as you gain experience as well. It will be hard to figure out how you best work, but it will be worth it. Just keep at it, and you’ll get to where you want to be.