I don't preplan. I have an idea and a problem that the main character has and a vague idea at how it's going to end. I often don't know what the big problem is. I learn what the main character learns it. So my first drafts read a lot like me stumbling around in a dark room, trying to figure out what each thing inside of it is, just by taste, touch and feel.

Then, when I get to the end of the book and figure out what the problem actually is, it's like turning on the lights of the room and seeing that the snake, the trunk of a tree and the massive bat's wing is really an elephant. I go back while the text is still hot and rewrite it as though I knew what the book was about since day one. I'm very prolific; going from draft .5 to draft 1 can take a month or two, sometimes three where 75% of my energy is on the total rewrite. The actual text of the first attempt is usually so rough that line editing it would take more work than actually rewriting the whole thing.

Then, I leave it alone for a spell. At least three or four months, sometimes a year. Then, when I go to rewrite what, although it was a rewrite is still very hot copy, I figure out that anywhere from 25-75% of what that version is is unusable. So, I rewrite again, from scratch, everything that doesn't work and heavily line edit the parts I keep.

When it's time to send it off to my editor, I do another rewrite. Hopefully by then I'm just line-editing, but rewriting what I have to.

When I gave up my job in 2012 to concentrate on writing, I knew I was going to have to keep 4-5 books in my hopper before I started to sell so that I would always have a book in creation, books in revision, and books being edited for publication. As much as the stories themselves aren't formulaic, the system is industrialized.

Before I sold anything, I never went back and rewrote. I never barely went back to edit, and if I did, it was to do as little change. My biggest breakthrough when it came to writing is classic writing 101 rule: great books aren't written. They're rewritten. If you had told me ten years ago that I would be willingly rewriting books from start to finish 3, 4 or 5 different times, I would have laughed in your face. But then I started selling.

The idea that your very first attempt would be the very best way the story could have been told, I would have laughed at you. It's a funny world where most pros tell people to rewrite and unpublished writers tell people they don't have to.