There is a habit that most writing advice skips over entirely: the pause between drafts. How I use a second draft has little to do with polishing sentences or tightening paragraphs. It is a different kind of work altogether, and understanding that difference changed how I write almost everything. The first draft is an act of excavation. The second draft is what happens when you finally look at what you dug up.

Most writers, at least early on, treat a second draft as an improved version of the first. They go back in, clean up the rough sentences, move a paragraph, fix a few transitions, and call it done. I did this for a long time. What I ended up with was a tidied version of whatever the first draft happened to be, including its wrong assumptions about what the piece was trying to do.

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