I’ve completed Draft 4 of my novel! I’m not sure, but editing might be more work than actually writing. I feel really emotional every time I get through the ending. I really hope that someday I’m able to share these characters and their story with you all, and hopefully, you feel the same emotional connection.
Before I get all sappy, I thought it would be fun to do a quick breakdown of what I’ve accomplished with each draft.
Breakdown of Drafts
Draft 1
My first draft consisted of writing every day for 4-5 months. I finished it with right around 107,000 words. It was full of errors, typos, rambling, broken plot points, and so on. However, it had a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
Draft 2
After letting Draft 1 marinate for a good decade or so, I picked it up and began to line edit. Fixing all of my typos and adjusting the formatting so it wasn’t giant walls of text. Making lots of notes on plot points and storylines that either got lost or didn’t work.
Draft 3
I began revising and reworking elements of the story to fit together better. There were a lot of details that I didn’t need, and some plot devices that I introduced but never used. I also threw out the entire last chapter and reworked the ending. The original final chapter had always bothered me and I didn’t like it. At the end of this draft I was at around 95,000 words. That shows how much fat I trimmed from it!
Draft 4
I continued tightening up the story, and rewriting a lot of paragraphs to make them more consistent. It’s feeling so much closer to completion, but there are still some places I want to work on. At the end of this draft had trimmed it to, 90,070 words! Holy moly, that’s around 17,000 words I’ve trimmed since the beginning. Need any further indicators on how much I can ramble?
Draft 5
I haven’t started it yet… However, I do have a plan. There are a few more plot points I’ve noted that I need to rework and fix up. I’m also planning on fixing my dialogue in this draft so that it is consistent and hopefully flows better.
Draft 6
Oh no, I’m already planning Draft 6. This should be the FINAL DRAFT. I’ll go through the entire novel one more time, trying to catch any typos, grammatical errors, wonky dialogue, confusing plot points, and whatever else I missed during the first 5 drafts.
From that point, I should be done with my revisions