How Many Drafts Are Enough?

In college, my writing professors stressed writing and rewriting. Get out a draft, revise it, write another draft, and repeat it until your paper is ready. I, like most of my classmates, wrote a first draft the night before it was due and turned it in without even looking it over.

Of course, although I was being a bad boy, I was not getting bad grades. I got an A's on my papers more often than not. I was happy that I could get away with it, but I felt like I was cheating myself out of learning how to write drafts.

I always wondered, though, how many drafts do we really need to write? If my first draft was good enough for an A, do I really need to write a second draft? That depends on what I want to get out of my writing.

If my only goal is to please my teacher and get a good grade, then one draft is enough. If I want to create something that I am proud to have my name on, one is almost never enough. Even if I got the vast majority of what I wanted to do correct, I would still need to fix typos I missed, clean up sloppy sentences, and cut out useless words and phrases. I know that because they plague every first draft I write (probably including every entry in this blog).

I think that writers in schools should please their teachers. But writers out of school need to please themselves. If you can read every word of your manuscript and are happy with it, you are done. More importantly, if you can read every word of your manuscript and there are no changes you want to make, then you are done.