Why I Threw Out My Novel’s Third Draft

How Starting Over Can Make a Book Better

When I discovered I wanted to be a professional writer, I was fifteen. At the time, I spent most of my time outside of school either writing or researching how to become a professional writer. Then, as a tenth grader, I quickly discovered the three steps to publishing a novel:

1. Write the book

2. Query agents

3. Submit to publishers

Although I knew the path to publication in theory, I wasn’t prepared for the hurdles and heartache of being an emerging writer. Now that I’ve taken two books to submission, I’m documenting my writing process with two goals in mind. The first is to offer the kind of insight into the publication process that I wish I had when I was starting out. The second is to help other emerging writers discover what works (and doesn’t work) for their own writing processes.

Last month, I wrote about my process for the first and second drafts of my novel. Today, we’re breaking down the approach I used for the third draft of my book.

In general, I use a three-draft process for everything I write. One of the best descriptions of this process comes from screenwriter Brooks Elms. In this Film Courage interview, he concisely describes the goal of each draft:

1. Draft 1: Get it down

2. Draft 2: Get it good

3. Draft 3: Get it great

In total, it took me six drafts to finish my book because I divided my revision process into two distinct stages: the macroscopic stage and the microscopic stage. For the first three drafts, I focused on getting the big-picture story down, then good, then great. For the second three drafts, I focused on getting the interiority, line-to-line writing, and scene craft down, then good, then great.

Here’s how I wrote the third draft of my book.

Draft 3

The third draft of You Will Survive This, formerly titled Cheonjimun. Read the novel’s pitch here.

Stats

• Goal: Rewrite the book to address the big-picture structural feedback from my agent

• Schedule: ~6 months

• Timeline: March 19, 2022 to October 3, 2022

• Audience: Myself and writing partner

Process

I turned in my second draft to my agent on November 1, 2021. Although she gave me her edit letter in early December, I had to take a three-month break from You Will Survive This to work on a revise and resubmit request for my other book that was on sub. Once I finished that revision, I returned to YWST and started the third draft. On a craft level, this draft was the most difficult out of the six drafts. Between March and May, I wrote over 200 pages for this draft, but nothing was working. I could see that there were problems with the story’s structure and pacing, but I couldn’t understand what was causing the problems or how to fix them. Since I couldn’t understand what was going wrong, I felt incompetent and discouraged.

Luckily, I joined my current company as a video game narrative designer in April 2022, and I had to study screenwriting again because I hadn’t written for visual media since college. I started with YouTube videos, and I stumbled across Eric Edson’s Film Courage lectures. As I’ve mentioned in past posts, I was a discovery writer, and I hated the thought of outlining anything. But watching Edson’s lecture, I was awestruck because the outlining structures he explained completely aligned with my own storytelling instincts. I always talk about his book, The Story Solution, because it taught me that there was a pattern to what I was already doing in my work, so I might as well capitalize on that pattern by using an outline to save time. In the book, Edson describes a structure called the Hero Goal Sequence Paradigm. By the end of June, I finished The Story Solution. That day, I went home and threw out the 200-page draft I was working on and started over from scratch using the Hero Goal Sequence Paradigm as an outline.

Up until this point, it took me almost four months to come to terms with the fact that I had to start over from scratch. In retrospect, I really wish I had outlined before I drafted because I would have avoided a lot of heartache. When I finally started over from scratch, I had to cut two of the best things I’ve ever written—a character I absolutely adored and the best ending I’ve ever written. Even though it was devastating to make these cuts (especially knowing that neither can be repurposed outside of the context of YWST’s story), a weight lifted off of me because my novel finally had a strong structure.

Looking back on my experience writing this draft, there are three things that worked for me, and three things I wish I’d done differently.

What Worked for Me

• Getting fresh eyes on my novel with the help of a new critique partner

• Living in Korea where my book is set

• Outlining and knowing when to cut my losses

What I Wish I’d Done Differently

• Not write on my lunch break

• Use an outline

• Accept that story should be my first concern and character my second

I ultimately wasted four months trying to keep a character that didn’t belong in the story. Plot doesn’t come naturally to me, so I wish I used an outline to make a chess table for the story and then added the characters as pieces later. Instead, I started with character and wrote literally over a thousand pages that I had to throw out in these earlier drafts. There are, of course, ways to make starting with character effective, those methods just aren’t a good match for my personal writing process. 

Do you start your stories with plot, character, or setting? What do you do to honor the things you’ve cut from your work? Tell me all about your writing strategies!

See you next week,

Kat