Thurber supposedly had a system where he did 19 drafts.

For years I tried to live up to this, and rarely could push myself past 6 or so.

And THAT was mighty hard, to get to 6.

These days, I do many more than 6, to the point where I’m on quite a high horse about it. I saw a thread the other day where someone was being praised for doing 5 drafts. I laughed out loud.

A famous writer editing story-- Isaac Babel had a giant stack of pages on his desk. A friend came by, saw the stack, and said, hey, I’m glad to see you’re finally writing a novel!

No, said Babel. These are 20 consecutive drafts of a short piece.

Here’s my method, or trick, for doing tons of drafts. (Method sounds better, but it IS a trick.)

Once I get a draft that is minimally presentable, has a beginning, middle, and end, and so forth-- I use this very simple rule.

I start at the top of the piece, and I read until I hit something I want to change. Even if all I do is add a comma, my rule is that one tiny edit means I then proceed to the end, editing as I go, and start over.

This way, I begin to get a pretty good sense of the whole piece in my head. This makes your editing much better, because it’s definitely possible to miss the forest for the trees.

You can catch a ton of small errors, and miss that you left out some crucial context, or wandered away from your original point, or made the same point twice for no good reason.

You can also have a piece that’s generally good, but needs more jokes. Or there can be a stretch with not enough jokes, which isn’t obvious until you realize how much better the next part is. Etc.

I’ve had pieces I thought were done, and I did a last token read through, changed a punctuation mark or something, started again, and all of a suddenly realized I’d edited for two hours after I thought I was done editing.

I think it’s probably wise to also have your own personal editing tricks to go along with this, like a list of areas where you make a lot of mistakes, priorities you don’t want to forget to deal with like making sure your paragraphs aren’t too long, and the like. And you can do a draft or 3 while you’re hunting for a specific kind of error.

At this point I edit without anything like that, and I’m pretty good at catching a long list of mistakes. But the main thing is to force yourself to do another complete pass every time you find even one adjustment to make.

Since I started doing this, I’ve become way more relaxed about editing, and I don’t keep track of how many drafts I do.