Every writer has a ritual. Some swear by color-coded corkboards. Some swear at color-coded corkboards. Some draft in cafés, others under blankets, others in their heads while dictating it all into their phone. All perfectly valid, but my process is a little more convoluted. I start with a screenplay.

This isn’t something I chose on purpose necessarily. It’s just the way my brain likes to organize story, and I blame past me entirely.

In my twenties, I studied screenwriting at the New York Film Academy, where structure is tattooed onto your creative DNA. Everything was about scenes, beats, momentum, intent. If fiction is a sprawling canvas and playwriting is an intimate stage, screenwriting is a pressure cooker. No wasted air. No meandering sentences. If a scene didn’t earn its right to exist, it died an unceremonious death right there in peer review.

I loved movies then—still do—and became fascinated with the concept of the script. That “Written By” credit at the beginning of films called out to me like a siren’s song, and I was hooked. I wrote a lot of screenplays that decade. A goofy teen comedy that deserved every bit of the evisceration it got in class. A big action-adventure blockbuster and its sequel—before I learned what a budget was and why producers weren’t interested in a $200 million script from the new kid. Even a modern-day Bigfoot mythos with a religious angle that almost got made until it hit the same budget concerns. Dramas, horror, a few character studies. More than half a dozen scripts, all training me to think in tight, purposeful scenes.

Even when I wandered away from Hollywood dreams to write code for my real life, those habits stayed. They taught me to approach story like architecture rather than improvisation. When the time came to step away from my career in tech and focus on writing again, I was surprised to come across an article by Diane Hanks in Writer’s Digest that gave voice to the approach I’d been using.

She describes screenwriting as a kind of narrative boot camp—one where each page has to carry its weight, the protagonist’s struggle must stay centered, and anything that doesn’t drive the story forward gets cut. She also talks about the moment a writer shifts from script to novel and suddenly inherits all the roles a film crew would normally handle: director, set designer, costumer, world-builder. In prose, there’s no one else to fill in the atmosphere. It’s you.

When you write a novel … You’re the writer, director, set designer, and costume designer. As a novelist, you’re completely in charge of creating your new world. This can be overwhelming and exhilarating all at once. But this is when working from a screenplay gives you a major head start since you’ve already envisioned this world, even if you haven’t fully described it on the page. — Diane Hanks

Her insight clarified my process even further. I start with scripts because they force me to think with clarity. They leave no room for indulgence. And when I finally expand those scripts into prose, I get to reclaim everything screenplay structure made me set aside—the inner lives, the world texture, the quiet beats that would never survive a studio page count or budget.

That’s where my Five Draft Process came from. I didn’t create it intentionally; I backed into it over years of working this way and it’s how I wrote both Pick Up The Pieces and The Family as well as several other shorter works.

My Five Draft Writing Process

When I talk about my Five Draft Process, what I really mean is that I build a story the way a screenwriter builds a film. By starting lean and layering in complexity once the foundation is solid. The first draft is basically a screenplay version of the story—whether novel or short story—it’s a stripped-down run-through of the plot and emotional core, but it’s complete—with a beginning, middle, and ending. In the second draft, I stay in screenplay mode but widen the frame, adding scenes, subplots, and the early shape of chapters and POV. Then comes the third draft, where I finally translate the whole thing into prose and let myself wander just enough to discover surprises without losing the spine. By the fourth draft, I’m editing with a cold eye, tightening and cutting until the story starts reading like a book. And the fifth draft is the polish pass, where I comb through every line and make sure it belongs, reads cleanly, and flows with what comes before and after. It’s a gradual deepening—starting simple, staying focused, and giving the story room to grow in exactly the right order.

The Details (if you’re interested)

Draft One: The Skeleton Film

It starts with an idea, of course. It doesn’t have to be a good “movie” idea; it can start as a short story or novel idea, but I’m trying to get to the core. What makes it compelling and interesting, not only to me, but to someone who will spend a lot of time reading it.

I strip the story down to its bare, trembling bones and ask, “What actually happens here?” Not what I think happens, not what would look pretty in prose—just the core. It’s the screenplay version of the book, so it lives in tight scenes, concise descriptions, and almost no introspection. I’m not allowed to wander. Every beat has to justify its existence.

What this gives me is clarity: the spine of the plot, the essential motivations, the emotional engine. In a screenplay, there’s no room for fluff—nobody writes a 200-page script unless they want to watch the producer’s soul leave their body, or they’re good friends with guys named Scorsese and Cameron. So, this format forces me to commit to the heart of the story without getting buried in side plots and interiority.

Draft One is also wonderfully low-pressure. It’s like giving the story permission to exist without judging it for wearing sweatpants and munching Funyuns on the sofa while binging the latest Netflix sensation.

Draft Two: The Director’s Cut

Now that the spine exists, I get to layer on the muscle. This is still script-format focused, but it’s where I let myself pretend that I do have friends like Scorsese who have given me the greenlight to expand. My secondary characters get more attention, B-plots arrive, alternative paths get tested, and new scenes grow out of old ones.

This is the draft where the puzzle pieces start whispering to each other. I see which character deserves more page-time, which thread needs foreshadowing, and which exciting tangent actually belongs in another book entirely. It’s also where I nail down structural choices—chapter shapes, point of view, and pacing arcs.

I think of this draft like assembling a film’s “director’s cut.” If Draft One was the “minimal” version of the story, then Draft Two is the “maximal” one. It’s longer, richer, sometimes messier, but it shows me the entire story before the metamorphosis.

By the end of Draft Two, I know what the story is and what it wants to be. And it’s also where I am most likely to kill a project because it’s not working. If I can’t make something work here, then it sure as hell isn’t going to work in prose, and I’ve saved myself an awful lot of time and heartache.

Draft Three: Turning Script Into Prose

This is the leap—the moment the muscled skeleton gets its nervous system and becomes real. Every scene gets written in actual prose for the first time. It’s no longer “EXT. HOUSE – NIGHT”; it’s atmosphere, voice, rhythm, interiority.

I’m a plotter by nature, but Draft Three is where I let a little chaos in. Characters surprise me here. Scenes open doors I didn’t know were in the floor plan. Sometimes a line of dialogue creates a missing emotional connection; sometimes a prose description reveals a thematic thread I hadn’t articulated yet.

But I still try to stay disciplined. Screenwriting trained me to resist the urge to drift, so while I allow new discoveries, I keep them attached to the spine I built in Drafts One and Two.

When I say that I try to stay disciplined, it doesn’t mean that I don’t let the prose wander sometimes. Great description and narration can be the beating heart of some stories, and if the situation calls for it, then I absolutely let it run free. If it serves the story, then it’s good to go. The discipline comes in knowing the answer to that question: Does it serve the story?

When Draft Three is complete, I have something whole. It’s ugly, sure—drafty, uneven, swollen in some places and skeletal in others—but it’s written. This is my equivalent to what most writers call their “revised first draft.”

Draft Four: The Ruthless Revision

This is the brutal one. The surgeon’s draft. Though sometimes it feels more like the mortician’s draft.

I go back through the entire manuscript and cut anything that doesn’t contribute to the story—even the bits I’ve convinced myself are brilliant. If a scene exists only because I like it, this is usually its last stop. If a subplot doesn’t support the emotional arc, out it goes. This phase is long, circular, and at times downright demoralizing—but it’s where the story truly tightens its muscles and starts showing some progress. Draft Three was packing on the gains; Draft Four is targeting for the cuts, the definition.

Sometimes though, there are underdeveloped areas that require additional work to bring them up to the same level as the rest of the manuscript. The trick is in understanding how to balance what you’re adding with what you’re taking away. For me, I still want to end up with less than I started with, but it’s not only about trimming. I’ve added scenes late in revision that ended up being crucial to the story. So, it’s a little like a sculptor slapping on more clay on one side while simultaneously carving a chunk off of the other. Finding the balance is where the magic happens.

Structure is refined here as well: chapter lengths, rebalancing POV time, shifting reveals so they land more cleanly. Anything confusing, slow, redundant, or overcooked gets fixed or removed. For my novel The Family, Draft Three finished with a 139,000 word manuscript that had a solid spine but was carrying excess bulk. I had to cut scenes that I really loved, including a flashback of Amelia that was poignant and heartfelt. But it was a detour, and the story didn’t have time for that, so into the folder of “deleted scenes” it went. But owing to what I mentioned earlier, I also added a small scene after the climax that fleshed out a character arc. At the end of this draft, the manuscript was tightened to 110,000 words and felt faster, not only in terms of page count, but in pacing as well.

Draft Four is the turning point where the manuscript shifts from collection of good intentions to cohesive, deliberate story, and that can take a long time. Sometimes a project dies here, and that hurts… a lot. But most of the roadblocks encountered in this draft can be driven around or plowed through with a little ingenuity.

Draft Five: The Line-by-Line Polish

This last draft is all about elegance and flow. I read every sentence and test it against these three questions:

Does it belong?
Does it read well?
Does it flow from what came before and into what comes next?

I focus on tightening prose, eliminating verbal clutter, finding stronger verbs, smoothing awkward rhythms, and making sure each paragraph carries emotional or narrative weight. This is where the book gets its final voice—the refined, intentional cadence.

It’s slow work, almost meditative. By the end, I’ve essentially inhabited the book line by line. And once this polish is done, the manuscript is ready to crawl out of my hands and head to my editor, who finds all the things I thought I’d fixed and points me toward the places where I can do even better. Depending on the project, the edit that follows might focus on big-picture structure or fine-grain language, but the book has its shape by then.

Wrap it up already

This whole five-draft approach works for me because it mirrors the way my brain naturally processes story—visually first, then as something fuller and more textured once the structure is locked in. I’m not claiming this is the method or even a recommended method; it’s simply the one that keeps me focused on the project and prevents me from wandering into the weeds too early. But if you’re the sort of writer who sees scenes unspool in your head like shots in a movie, it might be a framework worth experimenting with. Stories arrive in all kinds of shapes, and the trick is finding the one that lets you build them without breaking them. In my case, turning the lights down, imagining the big silver screen in front of me, and writing the script first is what gets me there—as if the story just wants a chance to watch itself before changing into its prose costume and proclaiming that it’s “ready for its closeup.”