Draft Zero
- Objective: Put down a sturdy foundation for the first draft. A stepping stone between planning and drafting.
- Plan the plot in detail, with a good premise, story beats, characters, and settings
- Don’t worry about sentence structure, word choices, punctuation, or grammar.
First Draft
- Objective: Teach you about the plot and characters.
- Type continuously until done without looking back and rewriting.
- Don’t worry about clichés, tense changes, repeated words, purple prose, bad grammar, or misspellings.
Second Draft
- Objective: To discover where the novel actually starts to take shape.
- Look at the entire novel from point of view of each of the major characters in each scene.
- Look at scene structure, balance, pace, sentence structure, vocabulary and style.
- Consider additional story line ideas and incorporating if they fit.
Third Draft
- Objective: To stretch the novel to its limits.
- Do more in-depth research where needed.
- Get serious about every single word.
- Focus on polishing subplots or developing a particular theme that runs throughout the story.
- Keep from rewriting the beginning over and over.
- Focus on layered characters, relationships nuances, symbolism, themes, textured description, and foreshadowing every element of the climax.
- Weed out repetitions, telling where you could be showing, and lazy or unnecessary adverbs.
Fourth Draft – FINAL
- Objective: Putting on the finishing touches, tidying up any loose ends, and getting the manuscript primed for submission.
- Time to get feedback that will be helpful, not just complimentary.
- Take a last slow, steady, critical look at the whole manuscript.
- Read the work out loud to help find clunky sentences and left out words.
- Dig out tired phrases.
- Pay close attention to every element of punctuation.