Ten Drafts

Hi friends,

Thanks for your wonderful response to my reopening to queries! I'm nervous/excited to see what lands in my inbox. My #MSWL, website, and Query Tracker are fully up to date on what I'm looking for.

Aside from thinking about queries, I've been writing another picture book, and I thought I'd tell you all how it's going.

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That's how it's going.

No, actually, it's going fine and normal and as expected. As the title above spoils, I'm on draft ten. TEN. On something that is 925 words. And over the course of those ten drafts, I think I've changed all those words except for page 3. Page 3 is working just fine.

Why ten drafts? Because that's what this one needs, and there will probably be (conservative estimate) five more, if it gets picked up. Here's what the process has looked like so far.

Draft 1: I've been playing with an idea for years and years, maybe even ten of them. It started with two characters, but I didn't know what they were going to do. So, I tucked them away and thought about it from time to time and eventually, I found some action for these two characters to do, paired up with an event I wanted to write about. I've had these two pieces in my brain for years and years, too. It wasn't until one random day it occurred to me they could be combined. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Huzzah! Synergy. (I'm being vague here not because it's some state secret, but because that's what feels right at this point.)

Draft 2: After letting Draft 1 sit for a bit, I went back to it. It was a mess. As with much of my writing, the story didn't actually get started until page like 15, which is a problem when you only have 32 pages to play with. So I rewrote it. Edited that. Edited that again. And again. In rewriting and editing, I made very bad doodles of what I thought the illustrations would look like on each page, to remind myself of what storytelling the pictures could do, that I didn't have to do in text.

Draft 3: I sent it to my agent! My wonderful, helpful, smart, funny, kind agent. And he told me alllll the things I already knew about this draft (it still didn't get started soon enough; we needed more action in the middle/end) and more. And he's right. It's not that I didn't want to make those changes in the first place, but sometimes you get to a point in a draft where you can't see the forest for the trees.

Drafts 4-9: I went back and forth with my agent at least this many times. And I welcome the edits! Michael helped me see that the two characters we start with kinda disappear by the end, and another character comes in late that should be introduced sooner. That there were still several pages where characters are standing around talking and there isn't anything for the illustrations to show. That a cute joke I liked just wasn't landing (and that's ok). All of these suggestions were correct. What Michael did on the actual document was point to things and say this part isn't working, not rewrite the text. (Tbh, I welcome both kinds of edits.) And deep down, these edits resonated with me, so I knew they had to be done. I redrew my bad doodles MANY times, and started from scratch SEVERAL times, but really, that's how it goes.

Draft 10: I have another round of notes from my agent. I think they're great notes, including a few things we hadn't thought of yet. For one question, I'm going to have to talk to an expert and it might change a whole character. All of this is fine and good. All of this is going to make it a better book. I'm excited! In some ways, writing a picture book is like putting a puzzle together when you don't know what the final image looks like. And I like a puzzle.

And then? It's possible we send the next draft out. It might need more edits, and that's ok, too. Of course I want it to be done (for now) and share it with my editor, but if we're not ready for that, I'll do more work. We do the work now so that it's hard for my editor to say no. And she could still say no! That's also how it goes. None of the work done to this point guarantees my editor will like it, that it'll get past the editorial board, that it'll get published, or will sell a ton of copies. I could be doing all this work for "nothing." But it's not nothing. It's learning how to write a better book, or a different book. It teaches me how to listen to that inner voice that says that page doesn't make any sense the first time, instead on draft 5. None of the choices I made, in any draft, were wrong. They were just not right for this particular story at that particular time.

If this one doesn't work, I'll write another one. I've done that half a dozen times already in the last ten years. That's how writing books goes. I can't change that part, for me or any of my clients, either. My choices are: I can do it this way and keep trying, or stop altogether and give up. I'm going to keep trying.

Oh, and if this does sell to my editor, she's going to have edits, too. And I say: bring it on.

XOXOXOX,

Kate

Who am I and what is this? This is Agents & Books, a twice-weekly newsletter about writing, publishing, and the creative life. I've been an agent for 20 years, most of it at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm the author of two books: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life (Simon Element, 2025) and a picture book called Pay Attention to Me!, with illustrations by Rob Justus (Sourcebooks, 2026). If you haven't already, become a subscriber today. $5 a month or $50 a year. Same price since 2019! Need to cancel? Look here.