The importance of drafts

When I first started Brad’s Reader many moons ago, I would fire up my blogging program, pound out a post and click the "publish" button without giving it a second thought. Then as time went on I began to notice typos, embarrassing spelling errors, and sentences that were just plain awkward.

Nowadays, before I even write the first sentence of a post, I set the status to "draft" so when I save the post it won’t go "live" on the blog. When the post is complete, I save it, and then I carefully read through each word. I’m often surprised at how much I end up editing. I usually delete a lot of awkward sentences and phrases, and even a few bad paragraphs.

Hopefully taking the extra time to edit my posts have made them better, easier to read and maybe even more entertaining for you.
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Why should you care about drafts?

All too often, especially with beginning writers, we think our writing is close to perfect and can get away with writing one, maybe two, drafts of a story. But you are only selling yourself short with this type of thinking. Good writing doesn’t happen in one burst of creative inspiration – it takes a lot of tedious work in the form of editing, rereading, editing again and then editing some more.

Find a second pair of eyes, if possible

For this blog, I usually don’t have someone read a draft of a post before I publish it to the site (although it wouldn’t hurt). But when you’re writing a story or article that you want to submit to be published, it’s always a good idea to have someone else read your draft to help find mistakes you possibly missed.

Can’t find someone? No problem! Read this great article about proofreading from Copyblogger, one of my favorite writing blogs.

Good writing = hard work

The pros make it look easy. Right? When you read a good novel, story or article, you probably don’t think about all the blood and sweat (i.e. hard work) the author had to put into his/her writing to make it so good. In fact, when I’m reading something and thinking about the writer editing the piece, it’s usually because I’ve found obvious mistakes that a sixth grader could’ve corrected.

Many people want to be writers, but few of them want to put in the work required to churn out good writing. Writing that extra draft and proofreading your work one last time can mean the difference between an okay story, or an excellent story that gets published!

Related posts

• Rough drafts, marginalia, and seeing a writer’s creative process!
• What’s your writing medium?
• Trimming the fat: Avoid redundancy in your writing
• Active vs. Passive Voice in writing
• Don’t wait for inspiration – just write!

Read More: Writing Tips