The Three-Draft Process for Novels and Video Games (Part 1)

Three Steps to Streamline Your Writing Process

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to streamline your first draft writing process with a video game writing technique.

I spent most of my professional life in South Korea where I worked as a video game writer. My work on our games typically fell into one of two categories: writing or translation. Some days, I focused on writing original English-language content for our games. Other days, I led the Korean-to-English translation and localization of content that our development team had created.

Before I became a game writer, I had always struggled with revision in my writing life. I had mastered locking up my inner editor, and I could churn out first drafts of novels and short stories quickly. But when it came to the second draft and beyond, I had a lot of difficulty self-directing my edits and establishing my priorities for revision. For many years, revision was one of my greatest weaknesses as a writer. But writing and translating for video games taught me concrete techniques that helped me revise my debut novel, Good People, and sell it to Simon & Schuster.

In our new game writing for novelists series, we’ll be breaking down the three-draft process I developed as a video game writer and how this process can streamline the drafting and revision of your novel or short story. Today, we’ll be focusing on the three steps I take to complete the first draft of a writing project. As always, take what’s useful (if anything at all) and leave what’s not behind.

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The Three-draft Process

Writing for video games has taught me that so much of revision is about the audience for each draft and the intention for your writing sessions. With this in mind, I approach every writing or translation project with a three-draft process. Everyone defines a “draft” in their own way. For me, a draft is a complete, end-to-end creation or rewrite of a story. Sometimes in a second draft, I might rewrite a twenty-page section ten times, but for my own organizational purposes, all that work still counts toward draft two.

Each draft in this three-draft process has a specific audience and editorial intention. Screenwriter Brooks Elms describes this process best. In a Film Courage interview, he says that while working on a story, writers have to “get it down, get it good, and then get it great.” This quote from Elms summarizes my intentions for each of the three drafts I write. These intentions also determine the audience for each draft.

In my first draft, I just want to get the story down so that I can tell it to myself. My intention for the second draft is to make the story effective enough on a macroscopic level that a trusted reader can help me solve lower-order narrative concerns. For the third draft, my audience broadens to readers who are looking to be entertained and will likely be less forgiving of glaring story problems.

For each of these three drafts, I have three concrete steps I take to get my stories down, good, then great. Today, we’re diving into the three steps I take to get a story down. In the coming weeks, we’ll also explore concrete ways to get a second draft “good” and a third draft “great.” For now, here are some strategies for writing a first draft.

Draft 1: Get It Down

Whether I’m working on Korean-to-English localization for a script or drafting my own novel, I’ve found that my first draft is most effective if my audience is myself and only myself. In a corporate setting, I do everything in my power to reserve enough time to guarantee that the only eyes that see my first draft will be mine alone. While working on the first draft of Good People, it was easy to establish myself as the sole audience member because I was a nobody. When I sat down to write my first draft, I was twenty-three, and I had no representation, no publishing contract, no readers to speak of. In short, nobody cared if I finished my novel, let alone whether or not my novel was “good”—whatever that means. This lack of expectation was incredibly freeing. Limiting my first draft audience to myself removed any pressure to write a book like the polished and published novels I was reading. Since I had no outside pressure, I was able to organically find my novel’s story by setting one simple intention: get the story written down from beginning to end.

Here are the three steps I take to lock up my inner editor and fast draft my first draft.