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@nuetrobolt Good questions!

“Do you have to write a second draft? How many drafts do you have to write? How do you write second/third drafts? Do you just go through the whole book rereading the whole thing, and correcting and rewriting parts? Or do you start a whole new document and start afresh?”

Yes, so most authors have more than one draft. How they go about writing the second one can vary. Usually, writers will just go back through and edit their first draft to create their second draft. I’ve rarely heard of people doing the “whole new document and start afresh” method, but I have run into a couple, as well as doing it once myself.

My normal editing process though, to go from draft one to draft two, is simply reading through, fixing grammar, trying to flesh out my characters better, cutting out unnecessary scenes, clarifying confusing parts, rewriting prose to sound better, etc – just stuff like that. For my third draft, I print out a couple pages at a time and read it aloud – I find a lot more mistakes that way. Then, fourth draft, I let a close friend or family member read and give feedback.

Past that, I have no personal experience, but I’m planning to actually try out a beta reader process in the next couple months, so I’m going to stick around here and hope that someone might drop some advice on how to do that. 🙂