Of course I know in the abstract, I've done loads of them for various things and, in the distant past, built a scalable writing/multimedia production process based on named drafts to ensure each script was up to standard, but...

If somebody was to ask how many drafts you had done on your manuscript, what would you answer?

Do you have a new draft each day when you finish writing, or only on those joyful moments when you reach the end?

If you change the order of chapters or a major storyline, is that a new draft? What if you only change a spelling?

What if you do a complete readthrough and decide that only one word needs to change to perfect your masterpiece? With the previous word, your MSS is incomplete, so surely that one word change makes it a new draft?

Or is draft, like God, just an utterly meaningless term due to a lax definition that people can adapt to suit their preferences and needs?

I ask only because I saw an agent requesting "number of drafts" for submission from new writers and considered it a very, very strange question that only makes sense in the context of the rest of their guidelines, and even then, only if you do not provide a number but rather a description of the process.

G

Good question. I suspect that back in the dim and distant past, we wouldn't have to ask ourselves this question, because you started a new draft when the old draft was so covered in deletions and emendations that you had to re-type it...

I think that agent's trying to sift out the people who think that when you've sat down and typed out 305 pages, you've written a book.

For myself, I do think in drafts, because I always work forwards through a novel, with a very clear idea of what the job is, this time. (which doesn't mean I don't tweak things as I come across them.) So my process goes like this.:

1) longhand and shitty results in 1st Draft:

2) typed up chapters - I type at the end of each chapter (there are probably only 10 or 12) - do the most basic sorting out of all those balloons and interpolations and re-jigs. This is the 2nd Draft, and when it starts feeling like a novel.

3 go through on screen, incorporating all the pages and pages and pages of notes 1 and 2 have generated, and everything else that needs doing - can be quite radical re-writing, can be commas. This may involve toing and froing if a particular strand of a plot needs sorting out, but the impulse is always forward. 3rd Draft

4) print out, read aloud and mark up, incorporate all the results of that. 4th Draft

That's probably the one I'll send to my trusted reader, who these days is my agent. I'll be thinking that it's more-or-less there: she may disagree, in which case I'll repeat 3) and 4) as necessary...

This is relevant: http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2008/07/fiddling-hangovers-and-the-paris-review.html

Emma

Ah, yes. The stripy sweater. Definitely the way to go.

Yes, it could also be historic. I frequently handwrite scenes and chapters but type them up as I go so as not to have to pick and reknit an entire sweater in one go later. So, by that measure, my first and second drafts overlap. But I also do things at the entire novel level and have distinct approaches to the MSS at different stages.

Equally, the further I go into a long piece, the less tweaking it needs on even a first draft as I understand what came before.

So, yes, I think the question can only be a newbie filter and the answer a matter of opinion.

G

So, by that measure, my first and second drafts overlap.

Quite. I used to write the whole novel longhand, and then give myself RSI typing the whole thing up, but for my MPhil I had to get chapters typed up and knocked roughly into shape, as I went, for there to be any point in workshopping them. I was a bit worried about that - you know how you cling to bits of process which seem to work - but in the event it was fine, and I would get stuck into the first-then-second draft of the next chapter, while that one was being workshopped. So I've done it like that ever since. Now I find it positively useful that at the end of perhaps weeks of writing a 15,000 chapter, word by bloomin' word, I get to re-cap on its shape and pace and structure as well as detail, by typing up over a day or two, before diving into the next. Indeed, if there's going to be a gap of Real Life, I postpone the typing-up, so it's the first stage of writing the next chapter, rather than the last stage of writing the previous one, if that makes any sense.

Stripey sweaters rule!

Emma