How many drafts of your book do you write? I’m thinking about this as I’m nearing the end of the first draft of Falling.

I know that once I write that last scene, although I won’t have any more story to write, I will be far from being finished writing the book. In fact, I’ve got a whole list of things I’ve got to add, fix and rewrite. So much so that I’ll probably end up adding another 5-10,000 words to my story.

Most of that will come in the form of descriptions—not just scenery and clothes, although a good bit of it will be that, but also feelings and changing dialogue tags to action tags (yes, I count that as description since it is description of action).

I know that it’s important to create a sense of place for my readers, but when I’m writing my first draft, I’m more concerned with relaying the story, action and dialogue. I’m more concerned with what’s going on, than where it’s happening. I focus more on getting across who the characters are than what they look like. I leave all of those details for my second draft.

In the draft after that, I’ll fix my hero’s speech patterns to be more unique to him and where he’s from. And in my penultimate pass-through I’ll get rid of as many adverbs and passive sentences as I can.

That’s four drafts, if you count each pass-through as a full draft—I do since with each pass-through I’ll probably add and remove sentences, if not paragraphs (hopefully adding more than I remove since my word count is low to begin with).

And then, finally, I’ll do one last read-through to check for grammar and to correct my punctuation (commas!!) to the best of my limited abilities before I send it off to my editor.

Whew! That’s a lot of run-throughs. Is it any wonder that I sit here envying those writers who say that they can write a book in only one draft, getting it right the first time through?

So, how many drafts do you write? How many times to you read through your work before sending it off to your editor?