Why should I write multiple drafts?

I used to think that I didn’t need to write multiple drafts. I thought I could get it completely right the first time. I was a bit of a “bleeder”; writing was like opening a vein in my arm and then drip-drip-dripping onto the paper. Once it was on paper, it was there and THAT’S HOW IT WAS GOING TO BE.

So what changed me from a draft-averse writer to a draft-o-phile?

Short explanation: I started really caring about my writing.

Long explanation: I got an idea for a large writing project that turned out to involve a lot more research and thought than I anticipated. Here’s what happened. I would dash off an interpretation, and then a few days later, I would find myself dissatisfied with whole swathes of my writing. I really cared about the project, so it had to be good, it had to be crystal clear, and I wanted it to have the best insight I could possibly muster. When the writing was good, I was intensely exhilarated, but when it wasn’t good, I was profoundly frustrated. So here’s the point—revisiting my writing after I thought I was done made me see that I needed to do another draft. Really caring about my writing and wanting it to be the best made me want to do another draft. And because I was practically obsessed with the project, I revisited my writing often enough that I kept catching more things to fix that I hadn’t noticed before.

I started to notice a pattern in the drafts I was doing.

1. Adding material
2. Organizing material
3. Removing material
4. Adding citations
5. Checking meaning
6. Checking grammar and punctuation

Each step above does not represent a single draft. Sometimes I had multiple drafts at a particular step. (The stages of organizing material and adding material usually involved the most drafts.)

I learned that each draft would reveal problems, and each draft had to be totally fixed before I could move on to the next. I learned that the small problems wouldn't be obvious until the bigger problems got fixed.

This experience showed me better than any school writing project that procrastinating a writing assignment until the last moment means that not all problems are going to get caught if there isn’t time to do multiple drafts.

Writing a new draft used to be harder than it is now. Before word processors made it easy to type papers, people used to make all their notes on note cards. Then they would put all those note cards in order and make a draft out of them. Writing a draft took a long time, so it made sense to avoid it as much as possible. (I’m so glad this is not our reality now!)

Now the barrier to doing multiple drafts has been substantially lowered, so there is no reason to avoid it. We can type out our first draft, print it out, then start scribbling notes all over it. We can cross things out, write additional snippets in the margins, and draw arrows where we want to move sentences or paragraphs. This is one of my favorite methods of drafting.

When you start bragging about the huge numbers of drafts you've done, that's when you know you're becoming a real writer.

Be green while drafting: You can save trees when doing multiple drafts by reusing the paper and printing on the back side too. Then recycle it.