When I sat down to write a novel, I had the naive idea that I’d write it all the way through, then do some copyediting, and be done. Turns out, when you write a novel, you write it again and again and again, and each time it’s like adding another layer. I have no illusion about being a great artist who can paint with words, but the accumulation of all those layers creates texture and depth. And my novel is getting there.

I’ve lost count of how many hundreds of pages I have written and thrown away, but here are my drafts:

• Zeroth draft, 2018: the result of my first NaNoWriMo. One month of writing, 50,000 words that read more like a technical manual than a novel, but contained the seeds of my story and characters. I spent December 2018 cleaning it up so that it resembled a story.

• First draft, 2019: basically took me all year, finished during NaNoWriMo again. Goal was to have all the components in place: a story with a beginning, middle, and end; main characters, side characters, structure. Writing wasn’t great and it contained big holes, like pivotal events summed up in a sentence, and an ending where the characters told each other, “As a result of our relationship, I grew and was able to complete my character arc,” before they trotted off into the sunset.

• Second draft, 2020: again, all year. Finished just before the end of December, with another NaNoWriMo boost in November that helped me get to the end. Goal: a real book with holes filled in and threads tied up; if somebody read it, I wouldn’t be embarrassed. Pandemic thought: if I die, I don’t want somebody to read my manuscript and think, “THIS is what she spent all that time on?”

• Third draft, 2021: In progress! Working through a long list of revision issues. Focusing on voice, pacing, characterization, dialogue, and transitions.

• Fourth draft, hopefully also 2021: setting, physicality, timeline, fact-checking, robot consistency (this is not a writing term; my characters are making robots), tightening and polishing.

• And then, fingers crossed, ready to query by the end of the year.

Zeroth and first drafts involved lots of free writing. Second draft, I drew charts and assembled notecards. Current draft, I’m going chapter-by-chapter, creating a separate “messy” file where I type in whatever comes to mind, then a “revised” file where I keep my chapter-in-progress, and when it’s done enough for my third-draft standards I copy it into Scrivener. Fourth draft, who knows? I have not yet arrived at a consistent process, and I’m not sure that’s possible for me.