The second draft is where the writing starts

Last October I started saving every draft of everything I wrote, down to the emails I rewrote before sending. By March the folder held eleven hundred files and one uncomfortable finding: almost nothing I was proud of had been in the first version.NoteSaving was automatic: a small script copied the file every time I closed it. Reading the copies back was the part that took discipline.

I don't mean the typos. I mean the sentences people quoted back to me, the openings that made an editor say yes, the endings that landed. They arrived on the second pass, or the third, usually as the replacement for a paragraph that had tried to say three things at once. The first draft, it turned out, was where I found out what I was writing about. The second was where I wrote it.

The myth of the first pass

There's a story we tell about good writers, and it goes like this: they sit down, they know what they think, and it comes out more or less right. It's a flattering story, and it's mostly wrong. The editors I've worked with say the same thing in different words. One told me she cuts a writer's favorite paragraph in most of the pieces she edits, and that the writer almost always agrees a week later.^a

The myth does real damage. If the first pass is supposed to be good, a bad one feels like a verdict, and people stop at the draft that embarrasses them. But that draft is doing exactly its job: getting the material onto the page, where it can be moved around.

The first draft was where I found out what I was writing about. The second was where I wrote it.

None of this means the first draft should be careless. It means it should be fast, complete and allowed to be wrong. A first draft with a beginning, a middle and an end, however clumsy, is worth more than a perfect first page, because you can't revise toward an ending you haven't written.NoteMy first drafts for this series ran between 4,000 and 6,500 words. None of the published parts is longer than 4,000.

What changes between drafts

Over the year I kept every draft of nine published essays, and for each one I traced every sentence in the final version back to the draft where it first appeared. The result surprised me less than it should have.

1. First draft18%
2. Second draft41%
3. Third draft27%
4. Fourth draft14%

Show the data

Words in the nine final essays, by the draft they first appeared in

Draft	Words	Share
First	5,930	18%
Second	13,510	41%
Third	8,890	27%
Fourth	4,610	14%

Fewer than one in five of the published words survived from the first draft. The biggest share, about two in five, were written on the second pass, which for me is the pass where I stop adding and start choosing.NoteBy a pass I mean one complete read from the top, not one sitting. Some passes took an hour; one took most of a week. The third draft did the tightening. The fourth mostly fixed what the third broke.

What changed, specifically? Three things, in roughly this order. The order of the argument came first, usually by moving the ending to the start. Then the examples, which got fewer and more particular: one furniture maker instead of "craftspeople," one Tuesday instead of "most days." Last came the sentences themselves, which got shorter where the idea was hard and longer where it was easy.

Reading it aloud

The most useful habit I picked up all year was reading each draft aloud, start to finish, before changing anything. It's slow, and it's a little embarrassing even alone, but the ear catches what the eye forgives: the sentence you can't say in one breath, the word used three times in a paragraph, the joke that only works if you already know the ending.

Printers used to send writers a galleyA first printed proof of the text, set in long columns before it is made into pages., and many writers read their galleys aloud for the same reason: hearing a piece at the speed a reader will meet it changes what you notice.^b I now mark a draft while reading aloud with three symbols only: a line through a cut, a caret where something is missing, and a circle around a passage I'll come back to.

Three symbols is a constraint, and the constraint is the point. When every mark has to be one of three, I can't rewrite on the page while reading. I can only notice. The rewriting waits for the next pass, which is where it belongs.

Knowing when to stop

If the second draft is where the writing starts, the obvious question is where it ends. My rule, after a year of evidence, is plain: stop when a whole pass changes nothing you'd defend to an editor. When I catch myself moving a comma and then moving it back, the piece is finished, and the next improvement will come from a reader, not from me.NoteThis is the rule the fifth part of the series argues with. A good editor's first read is worth two of your own passes.

None of this is new. Anyone who has written for a while knows the first draft is a shovel and the later ones are a trowel. What keeping the drafts gave me was the number, and the number changed how I spend my hours. I now give the first draft a third of the time I used to, and I spend the rest where the writing actually happens.

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Iris Calder's next part, "Reading aloud," appears in the Saturday letter on December 5 and in No. 15.