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The Stages of Writing a Novel For Publication (So You Know What To Expect)
You will have to reread and rewrite your novel many more times than you think
I saw a meme the other day that said you’d better love your novel enough to reread it 75 times. I imagine a lot of writers would have read that and laughed, thinking, Nah, I’ll be done in 3 or 4 drafts. Other writers would be thinking, 75? Try 175!
75 is probably exaggerating. But not by much, not if you are really committed to writing the best novel you can, and if you are then going to be traditionally published.
As an example, my current novel will be published in 2022. So far I’ve done two complete drafts of it, but along the way, I’ve reread it at least five times and rewritten small parts of it. Even though I feel bad about the paper, for serious new drafts, I tend to print off the previous one so I can write all over it and make notes and use highlighters and spread it out across the table and make diagrams. All that stuff that comes with rewriting.
Now I have received nine single-spaced pages of notes from my editor. I’m about to print the novel out again (I try to recycle paper but my printer hates it), and I will probably reread it 2–3 times as I work my way through, applying all of my editor’s notes and…
