What % of your first drafts have made it through?

Plot level, 80%. Scene level, about 50%. Paragraph level 25%. Sentence level 5%.

Plot level means the overall plot of the manuscript and the side plots. I only changed the ending quite drastically from my first draft.
Scene level I think roughly half of the scenes survived as such. I introduced new ones and changes to quite a few, whether it was introducing different characters into them or changing viewpoints or how the scene advanced the plot.
Paragraph level one fourth survived. This is a bit more difficult to guess, because it's a sort of mix between scene and sentence, but I was particularly thinking here, that what a single paragraph was trying to convey in terms of plot advancement.
Of the sentences in my first draft, I'd say 5% got to the final manuscript. But that's almost a total shot in the dark, just to say that quite a few sentences did survive.

Just as a FYI I recently trunked this manuscript, because I couldn't gather much interest with it.

I like TSJ's numbers. My numbers would be closer to 90, 60, 10 and 5. My very first draft had a terrible voice and was total garbage. I'm not even counting that one. I started over from scratch, and thought the next draft was salvageable. I moved a lot of scenes around, dropped some and added more. I'm pretty sure I've edited almost every single sentence in the book at some point, and I still do.

The first draft had some good scenes and nice descriptions. Out of about 4000 paragraphs, I felt maybe 100 were really good, 1000 fair, and the rest needed help. I had a lot to learn. Now, it's probably closer to 1000 really good, 2000 good, 1000 fair, and only about 100 needing help. I got rid of a lot of bad paragraphs by deleting the first five chapters.

I still have a copy of that first draft, and occasionally when I'm working on a paragraph I'll go back to that draft and see how I wrote it then. Scares me sometimes when I find that not a lot has changed, but then a single word replacement or phrase rearrangement can have a major effect.

One thing I changed a lot is the dialogue. Very clunky in the original draft, a little better now, but I still don't think I've rooted out all the clunkiness. (And why is the browser underlining this in red? Perfectly good word.)

It depends. A first novel might need a complete rewrite. Or not. A tenth novel might need only tweaking. Or more. There's no guarantee.

FWIW: I have five novels published, #6 will be released 7/31 this year, two more scheduled for next year, and one in progress.

Why do you ask?

The answer is going to be different for each writer, of course. I suspect outliners end up keeping more of what they started with than those of us who wing it, but I don't know.

For me...I've got three published books, one I'm drafting, and one I'm currently revising. I'd guess anywhere between 30% and 60% for each, depending on how much of the plot I change as I go, and whether or not I start the first draft too early in the story.

I wing it a lot.

I'd estimate about 75%, as applied to novels. A little higher, I think, with short stories.

caw

I'd say between 80-90% with my novels, as I'm constantly editing as I go and rarely have any major work to do once I reach the end of the draft. I write very slowly because of this method, but I'm always relieved when I get to the end of the manuscript as the hard work has been done.

ktdude said:

I'm genuinely curious, as I am trying to strike the balance between the whole 'vomit draft'/'zero draft' whatever you want to call it - that many people refer to - you know, just chuck it all down and don't worry about any of the writing - and the trying to avoid writing absolute swathes of utter rubbish that will be discarded in a later draft.

I suppose the question could be broken down into 'actual writing' and 'plot' potentially, to be more specific. But just interested in general too, if anyone has a clue!

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This isn't how I write at all, though I'm aware many do. I'm 'actually writing' from the first word, and I revise as I go. (I'm a hybrid plotter/pantser, using or not using my pages of detailed notes as the story dictates). My one completed novel (trunked) still took a very, very long time to complete, largely because a) it was in a genre I'd never tried to write in before, b) the skillset required was, frankly, beyond my abilities, and c) I took huge breaks of months at a time (almost a year, at one point) where I wavered on the edge of abandoning it for something easier/more natural to me. When I finally hit The End, I had a relatively clean 'first draft' that might've been the equivalent of a 'vomit' writer's third or fourth draft. In later revisions, I ended up adding another 5 per cent in fleshing out/smoothing transitions/adding foreshadowing/tying together, then cutting about 10 per cent of the total, which included around 50 per cent of my first three chapters.

This is just my process for one book, though, which incorporated a massive learning curve and may or may not represent how future books get written. (My WIP is coming along much more quickly, for a few different reasons.) So I'm not sure how useful it is!

About 2% for MS1

About 20% for MS2.


For MS1 that involved getting to the end several times, and overhauling the whole thing. For MS2 the rewrites happened as I went, so that was an improvement, and I had a better idea of my core scenes and core themes from the get go.


I am unable to plow through when things aren't work. Some people can but *for me* specifically, struggling to get words on the page means I need to take my plot and/or other items back to the drawing board before progressing. Sometimes, it's not even "this scene doesn't work" but "this scene isn't quite what I want" if that makes sense.

In a dreamworld setting particularly (mentioning since we share that in common), you have a double edged sword of "this scene can be anythign I want" (more or less) which is good, but also "this scene has to be MIND MELTING, precisely because it can be anything imaginable" which is a lot of pressure.

ktdude said:

Thanks everyone these responses are really valuable. I realise it will vary hugely from writer to writer/ I am in the process of throwing down scenes like there's no tomorrow at the moment with zero finesse or even attempt at it, I feel like I've lost connection with the narrative voice somehow but that I still have plough on getting the plot down, and I'm wondering I guess if this is a typical approach or if I should be looking to take a step back, even though to do so would feel like a major loss in momentum.

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The only approach that matters is what works for you, for this particular project. That said, I hear you about balancing forward progress with keeping in touch with the narrative voice.

One approach I use in that situation is to start my writing session with a brief edit/review of the previous day's work before I start laying down new words.

No percent. Every first draft I have ever written has been complete crap. I always revise. Lucky to those who can write a book in one sitting...I just can't do it.

I eliminate potential novels before starting on them in earnest because I run through the story and create an outline of the major plot points before I do any actual writing.
So, 100% of my first drafts end up as novels... now, whether they get published in another matter.

Um... maybe 5%? The characters. Some of the plot events. Of the actual writing, nothing at all. I rewrote the book completely from the ground up, turned the main plot into a sub plot and created an entirely new main plot, new antag, everything. The original novel was actually fan fiction that got re-written as original fiction anyway, so.... its been through a bit of a drastic transformation, lol.

I've had two novels published. The first one contains almost nothing of its original draft (<2% I reckon), while the second one is about 85% of its first draft. No pattern in mine yet! Fingers crossed they're mostly like the second ...

First, I'll qualify my numbers with this: I don't write a vomit draft. I discovered I can't work that way. My process is to plot first and have a solid picture of what happens in the scene before I sit down to work. I write for about 20 minutes, then to reread and cleanup what I just put on paper, making a notation for a future revision if needed. This severely limits the amount of revisions needed.

In general, my first draft make up 80% of the final. Most of my first draft is in the final with minor tweaking. What I add is basically filling out description, rounding out scenes and smoothing the scene and chapter transitions.

I'd say 30-40%. I kept a little more of the plot than the actual writing (aside from the early chapters), but really, my first draft was awful. I'm working on the second draft of another book, and I think that'll be closer to 50%, but it's still too soon to tell.

I dont vomit draft either, and I edit as I go. But those edits involve changing chapters along the way, and evert revision pass (there are many) overwrites previous content here and there, until the whole thing is very different.

That depends massively on the project. I have five completed novels. I don't necessarily do "drafts" per se, the way some people do, but I'll do my best:

The first novel: -500% [Meaning it's been rewritten from bottom-to-top several times!]
The second novel: probably 80% remained unchanged.
The third novel: 90% or so remained from after I first reached "the end".
The fourth novel: Uh, 20%? This was extensively rewritten as I worked out plot points, but honestly, I count that all as "first draft", so maybe 90%?
The fifth novel: 80-90%.
The novella: about 80%.

I tend to go down a certain path, and then if I find I hit a dead end (if I find I haven't hit the sweet spot to make it twang), I change course; so, when I reach the end I have it all pretty clear in my head. Of course, there's always a certain amount you want to clean up or change on editing passes, but that tends to be minimal for me. You'll notice novel 1 was rewritten over and over; that's me feeling my way, and after that experience I grew a lot as a writer and needed less of that "finding my way" time. I recently rewrote it yet again, and I think I finally hit that sweet spot.

I also heavily revise on a sentence and paragraph level as I go, but 98% of plot and setting get through, whereas maybe 70% to 75% of my original word choices make it to THE END.

60-70%.

Unpublished.

Another thing I like to do when I revise a chapter, is use Word's compare feature. Just save the original chapter onto another document, save that and press the compare button. It doesn't give a percentage, but I look at it every now and then.

If I'm in "the zone" when I write something, and I can feel the emotions pouring onto the page, then I don't need to do very much editing at all. On the other hand, there are paragraphs that I've spent weeks working on.