When is a draft not a draft?

Colleagues and friends kindly ask me at regular intervals how the book is going, to which I say that (fingers crossed) I’m still on track to have a first draft of the monograph at some point in the spring (giving me several months to do mopping up archive trips to Poland, editing, checking, etc).

I’ve begun to wonder a bit, however, about this phrase ‘first draft’, and what it really means. The printed-out chapters already filed in my mock-up ‘book folder’ are certainly not first drafts, in any strict sense of the word… as any glance at my computer files will reveal. In the pc folder entitled ‘Chap 1’, for example, there are 7 versions of that chapter: the current one, and its much less happy ancestors. By ‘first draft’, I suppose I mean: after weeks of working on this piece, this is the first draft that I am reasonably happy with, in the full knowledge that it will be rewritten (possibly radically) once the rest of the book has taken shape, to keep it in line with everything else. ‘First draft’ means, in other words, ‘good enough for now’.

I’m not sure that many historians do write first drafts of chapters, in the purist sense, of writing a chunk of prose from beginning to end for the first time, like running a race from starting gun to finishing line. You might write some of it, realise that despite all your planning and analysis there is a structural problem, unpick it, then carrying on writing. (A bit like iteration). Editing, writing, rewriting and rethinking are so closely entwined, that what constitutes a ‘draft’ is a moot point, and counting with any precision how many ‘drafts’ of a chapter it takes to get to the final version is perhaps therefore impossible. ‘Draft’ implies that we work in neat units of polished prose; it may look like that at the end, but the process itself feels far more organic. So maybe ‘draft’ is a psychological category used by writers, rather than an empirical measure of progress.