The third draft is where the plot goes

Every writer I know describes drafting differently, and most of the descriptions are tidier than the thing itself. Here is mine, as unflattering as I can make it.

First draft: find out who is in it

The first draft of The Salt Line had a brother who did not exist until page 190. He is now the reason the book works. I could not have planned him, because I did not know until I got there that Ada needed somebody who had already signed.

So the first draft is not an attempt at the book. It is an attempt to find out which people are actually in it. It is allowed to be badly shaped, and mine always are.

Second draft: make the timeline survive contact

This is the joyless one. Eleven weeks until the spring tides means eleven weeks, and if a scene happens on a Tuesday, the tide table has to agree. I keep a spreadsheet — a column for the date, a column for who knows what, a column for the water.

Roughly a third of what I found in the second draft of the last book was a character knowing something four days before they could have known it.

Third draft: the plot

Only now. With the right people in the room and a timeline that holds, the question of what actually happens becomes answerable, because it stops being what would be interesting and starts being what would these people do by Thursday.

The plot of a novel is not an invention. It is a consequence of two things you settled in drafts one and two.

Fourth draft: sentences

And only sentences. If I am still moving chapters in the fourth draft, something in the first three did not get finished and I have to go back, which I hate and which is always correct.

The one rule I would give anybody

Do not fix prose in a draft where the structure is still moving. You will fall in love with a paragraph, and the paragraph will hold a scene in place that the book needs to lose. I have lost more good chapters to a good sentence than to any editor.