The importance of iteration in writing

The version of Coldharbour that will be published next year is based on a document entitled:

Coldharbour Tenth Draft Complete.

Tenth Draft.

Admittedly, this was my first time writing an entire novel for publication, so I am desperately, desperately, hoping that each book in the series won’t require ten whole drafts and two and a half years each, but either way…

These are pretty distinct drafts.

The First Draft is a monster of a thing at 235,000 words (a bit shorter than The Order of the Phoenix), whereas the finished product clocks in at just under 100,000 (a normal, commercially viable length for a debut novel), but the drafting process hasn’t just been a gradual slimming down of content. Of course, I’ve spent a huge amount of time plotting and replotting and educating myself on the subject too, but as time has gone on, I’ve simply become a better writer.

And now, if I may say so myself, it’s a pretty good book.

But I wouldn’t have got there without iteration.

What is iteration?

As Lee G. Hornbrook writes in his excellent Medium article (paywall):

“Iteration” can also mean a new version. Thus, different versions of a written draft can be called separate iterations of the same story.

Writing is an iterative process. We repeat actions in sequence until conditions are met. Those conditions are clarity, coherence, diction, understandability, register, voice — many facets of writing that we make decisions on in thousandths of a second.

In other words, a writer will never get what they perceive as perfection first time. Being creative often means being repetitive – there’s a reason why a painting takes ages to paint, why actors rehearse repeatedly, why sculptors have to chip away and away until they realise their vision. Yes, some songwriters bash out their best song in five minutes, but most of the time, it takes work.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

The importance of feedback

Sometimes, you can’t see the wood for the trees. There have been times where I have been absolutely sick of the sight of my writing, like real walking-away-from-it-and-doing-something-different-for-a-month sick of it.

Sometimes, I’ve simply been stuck too. Sometimes, I’ve known that something isn’t quite right, there’s something that I’m not satisfied with, but I haven’t known what to do, which route to take through these gnarly trees.

And that’s where feedback comes in. Not only have I consulted a lovely and insightful literary professional, I also have two close people in my life who I’ve shared my writing with, one who is an exceptionally picky reader and the other who is the most voracious devourer of literature I think I’ve ever met, and luckily, I trust their judgement.

But I’ve also used a paid beta reading service, in which twelve people who enjoy speculative fiction gave me amazingly detailed feedback on characterisation, plot, style, and everything in between. They absolutely pinpointed all those little niggles that I hadn’t quite managed to work out and offered other suggestions that, on the whole, absolutely made sense and made the book better. Honestly, I was so happy with the beta reading that I’m now working with the same agency to publish the Coldharbour series.

How to apply an iterative process to creative work

What I’ve learnt very quickly with iteration is:

Don’t even try to do everything at once. It’s really tempting to ‘just make it better’, but I tend to divide my drafting into a few different categories, such as plotting, structuring, characterisation, general embellishment (making description more immersive, for example), and general cutting.

So, with every draft, I go through all of my stages, methodically working sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, and slowly, but surely, my writing begins to near a standard I feel comfortable with!

Here’s a practical example.

An extract from Chapter One of Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death (coming out January 2026)

The first paragraph I’m showing you has had minimal changes over time – however, the paragraph which immediately follows it has:

Here Alex was, a country crossed. Gone were the pot plants and the perfectly neutral bedrooms with no hint of anyone ever having stayed there. Here was the café with its nicotine-stained net curtains and peeling wax tablecloths, getting picked into shards by her broken fingernails. At least this was the same. The café. Same curtains, same tablecloths, same cloying smell of grease…

First Draft (2022)

Different waitress though.

She would’ve remembered her, with the red hair, which didn’t look dyed, at least from where Alex was sitting, and those eyes, the left bloodshot, pupil blown, among the jagged scars that fell like burning lightning from her temple to her cheek.

The woman’s face split into a dark grin.

“I promise I didn’t get them in the kitchen.”

Eighth Draft (2023)

Different waitress though.

Alex didn’t need to give that many surreptitious glances over her menu to be fairly sure that she would’ve remembered her, with the red hair, which didn’t look dyed, at least from where Alex was sitting, and those scars that skewed her mouth into a crooked not-quite smile that revealed canines that were as sharp as they were chipped, and she was wondering if she stared at the waitress forever, if she would always find something new to fixate on, when the woman’s face split into a dark grin and she said:

“I promise I didn’t get them in the kitchen.”

By this point in the process, I was getting serious about iteration and not just learning how to plot effectively.

The most significant changes relate to the description of the waitress’ eyes and the extra detail about the scars, which now appear later in the first chapter, as it became more of a moment of deeper connection between her and Alex.

I also wanted to provide more characterisation for Alex, in order to demonstrate her immediate fascination with the waitress, which we can see with the ‘surreptitious glances’ and ‘something new to fixate on’.

Final Draft (2024)

Different waitress though.

Alex didn’t need to give her that many surreptitious glances over her menu to be sure that she would’ve remembered her. She didn’t think she’d ever seen hair that unapologetically ginger outside of the Spice Girls for a start and it didn’t look dyed, at least from where Alex was sitting. Then, which other people probably noticed first, there were the scars that skewed the waitress’ mouth into a crooked not-quite smile that revealed canines that were as sharp as they were chipped and slightly yellowed, just like all the mugs stacked precariously on the counter. Alex wondered if she stared at the waitress forever, if she would always find something new to fixate on –

The face split into a dark grin and said:

“I promise I didn’t get them in the kitchen.”

The Eighth Draft changes have remained, but I just added a couple of extra context clues for embellishment and a sense of place – Coldharbour is set in 1999 and, well, let’s just say that this café is not particularly well-run. Also, Alex is an ex-journalist, naturally very nosy, and her anxiety has left her hypervigilant, so it’s character-revealing that she observes so much of her surroundings so quickly.

To be honest, the First Draft version of the paragraph I’ve analysed here isn’t terrible. It’s alright, but it just hasn’t got quite enough life in it and Coldharbour is one of those books that is full-blooded. Coldharbour is Gothic with a capital G: it’s emotional and fun and dramatic – and it deserves a bit of care and crafting, which, for me, is where iteration comes in.

I just now have to do it for a few more books…