The Three-draft Process for Novels and Video Games (Part 2)

How to Write a Second Draft

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to write a second draft using a three-step video game writing technique.

In Part 1 of our Three-draft Process series, we talked about screenwriter Brooks Elms’ approach to this drafting method. In a Film Courage interview, Elms essentially says that a writer writes the first draft just to get the story down, a second draft to get the story “good,” and a third draft to get the story “great.” Today, we’re breaking down the three steps I take as a video game writer to make my second drafts “good” and how these steps can help you revise a novel or short story. If you’re just now joining us, you can check out Part 1—our craft lesson on writing first drafts—here.

In our previous lesson, we discussed the importance of identifying the audience for each draft and how identifying this audience can help us (1) write with more intention and (2) lower the stakes for the draft so that we don’t get overwhelmed by the expectations of others. Whether I’m writing for video games or working on my own novel, my first drafts are most productive if the audience is me alone and my intention is to just get the story down from beginning to end. For my second draft, my audience is a trusted reader who can help me solve craft concerns like worldbuilding, in-chapter pacing, and creating tension on the scene level.

Once I’ve established my audience for my next draft, I ask myself: what does this draft need to do well so that my trusted reader can provide the most actionable feedback? More often than not, my answer to this question revolves around story structure. In order for my audience of trusted readers to give me actionable feedback, I need to get my story structure “good” enough so that their feedback doesn’t focus on big-picture problems that I already know I need to address. And so, my goal for my second draft is typically to revise to make my story effective on a macroscopic level, and I achieve this goal with three steps.

Before we jump in, you know what to do: take anything that's useful to your writing process and leave everything that’s not behind.

Draft 2: Get It Good

For a long time, I struggled with writing second drafts because I lacked editorial direction. Early in my writing life, I thought an editor would help me establish an editorial direction for revision, but as I started submitting short stories to literary magazines, I quickly realized that editors are looking for stories that are “nearly done.” In the last decade, I’ve published dozens of short stories. While working with literary magazine editors, I never once received feedback on macroscopic concerns like story structure, character arcs, or pacing. Their feedback always focused on copy edits or line-to-line writing. In my own experience as an editor, if I read a story from the slush pile and it needed more work on big-picture craft elements like structure or pacing, I always rejected the story.

When it comes to querying, agents are expecting to receive manuscripts that have been developed and revised as much as possible without professional editing. In other words, to have the best shot while querying, a writer must (1) study craft, (2) write their book, and (3) revise to implement their study of craft. In my experience of querying agents and preparing a novel for submission to editors, I always knew my work was “done”¹ if there was truly nothing else I could think of to try out in revision.

So, if agents and editors are expecting “near finished” work (to a certain degree), what are we supposed to do as writers to self-direct our revision?

Well, the first and most important step is to determine the source of your struggle when it comes to revision. I’ve found that writers often struggle with revision for one of two reasons: