Readers tend to assume a novel arrives the way they find it: tidy, finished, sitting on the shelf looking rather pleased with itself. I wish. The version you buy is the well-behaved child, scrubbed up and presentable for company. You never meet its earlier siblings, the ones locked in a folder on my hard drive labelled, with total accuracy, “DRAFT SHITE”.
The honest answer to how many drafts a novel goes through is: more than the author will happily admit to over a coffee. But since you’ve asked, let me pull back the curtain and show you the mess behind the magic trick.
The First Draft Is Supposed to Be Terrible
Here is the thing nobody tells you before you start: the first draft of anything is almost always dreadful. Not “needs a quick polish” dreadful. Properly, industrially bad. Characters with the depth of a cardboard cut-out, and dialogue so wooden you could build a shed out of it. Plot holes wide enough to reverse a lorry through.
And that is fine. That is the job. The novelist Terry Pratchett had a lovely name for this stage. He called it “draft zero”: the version you write purely to tell yourself what the story actually is, and which absolutely no one else is ever allowed to read. By his own account, he then worked through roughly five proper drafts on top of that before a book felt reader-ready.
I find this enormously comforting. A man who sold tens of millions of books still began each one by writing a version so ropey he hid it from human eyes. If Sir Terry allowed himself a draft zero, the rest of us are surely permitted our draft minus-four.
The Rewriters Who Simply Would Not Stop
Some authors take revision to a place that borders on the insane. Ernest Hemingway told The Paris Review in 1958 that he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he felt satisfied, because he kept struggling to find the right words. Scholars later dug through his papers and counted forty-seven different endings, ranging from a couple of sentences to several paragraphs. Scribner eventually published all forty-seven in a 2012 edition, so you can now watch a literary genius fail to make up his mind, in real time, across an appendix.
Forty-seven endings. For one book. I have written whole novels while making fewer decisions than Hemingway made about a single final page.
The American short-story writer Raymond Carver went the same way. He once said he’d penned as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a single story, and never fewer than ten or twelve. Twelve drafts as his absolute floor. Most of us would file twelve drafts under “nervous breakdown with a word count”.
Fifteen Openings and a Plot Given Away
My favourite example belongs to J.K. Rowling. She has said she wrote around fifteen versions of the opening chapter of the first Harry Potter book before settling on one. The reason each earlier attempt failed? They all gave too much away. Apparently, if you stitched those discarded chapters together, they more or less explain the entire series.
Think about that for a second. Somewhere in a drawer sits a version of Harry Potter that hands you the whole plot on page one, like a magician opening his act by explaining exactly where the rabbit lives and how much he pays it in carrots. J.K. binned fifteen openings to protect a single secret. The secret held.
So What Is the Normal Number?
Here is where I disappoint you. There isn’t one. Ask ten novelists, and you’ll hear ten different answers, most of them followed by a defensive little laugh.
Broadly, a full-length novel from a working author tends to pass through something in the region of five to ten meaningful drafts before publication, plus actual editing on top. Some writers do far fewer and simply revise as they write, layer upon layer, until a single pass reads clean. Others, the Carver types, treat draft ten as a warm-up. Michael Crichton put it best: books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. He added that this remains one of the hardest truths to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite still hasn’t cracked it.
The number matters far less than the willingness. What separates a finished novel from a hopeful folder of half-ideas isn’t raw talent or the right writing playlist. It’s the grim resolve to open the terrible first draft on a wet Tuesday and make it fractionally less terrible. Then do it again. And again, until “again” stops improving anything. If you fancy the gory detail, I’ve written before about how an indie author actually edits a book, which is less romantic than it sounds and involves a great deal of muttering.
The Version You’ll Never See
By the time one of my novels reaches you, I’ve put it through the wringer more often than I would care to confess in print. Whole characters have vanished. I’ve demolished endings and built new ones in their place. Jokes I adored, I quietly took out the back and dealt with, because they served me and not the reader.
And you see none of it. You see the clean copy, the confident one, the version that struts onto the page as though it always knew precisely what it wanted to be. The messy truth stays hidden, which is exactly how it should be. Nobody wants to watch the sausage being made; they simply want a decent sausage.
So the next time a book moves you, spare a thought for the eight or nine earlier versions that didn’t. They took the beating so the final one could look effortless.
There’s a reason rewriting sits so close to my heart. So much of my fiction hands ordinary people the rarest gift imaginable: the chance to go back and redraft not a chapter, but a whole life. In The ’86 Fix, Craig Pelling is a fortysomething stuck in a loveless marriage and a dead-end job when he’s handed a brief trip back to 1986 to fix where it all went wrong… a first draft of his own life, suddenly with the red pen in his hand. And in In Lieu of You, Gary Kirk is offered the chance to travel back to the day he first met his wife and steer his teenage self clear of her, unpicking nearly twenty-five years of marriage before it happens. Both books circle the same quietly terrifying question every rewrite asks: if you could do it all over again, would the new version truly beat the one you already have?
Frequently Asked Questions
How many drafts does the average novel go through?
There’s no fixed number, but most working novelists pass through somewhere between five and ten substantial drafts before publication, followed by a further round or two of editing. Some do fewer by revising heavily as they write; others do many more.
Is the first draft of a novel really that bad?
Usually, yes. Most authors accept that a first draft exists simply to tell them what the story is. Terry Pratchett called his “draft zero” and never let anyone read it. The real work happens in the rewriting.
Which famous author did the most rewrites?
Ernest Hemingway is a strong contender. He claimed he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, though scholars later found forty-seven different versions among his papers, all published together in a 2012 edition.
How many drafts did J.K. Rowling write for Harry Potter?
J.K. Rowling has said she wrote around fifteen different versions of the opening chapter of the first Harry Potter novel. Each earlier attempt gave too much of the wider story away, so she kept discarding them until she found one that held the secrets back.
Do professional authors ever publish a first draft?
Almost never. A first draft is typically full of plot holes, flat characters and clumsy dialogue. What readers buy is the polished result of many passes; the rough early version stays firmly on the author’s hard drive.