I Have to Write How Many Drafts?!

Stumbled across this today. It is by Neil Gaimen, a best selling novelist (Coraline among others) who also occasionally writes TV scripts for the show Doctor Who. Anyway, in the quote below he talks about writing this particular script 10 times.

We’re about ten days away from the Doctor Who table reading. I spoke to the Director for the first time yesterday. And the script is pretty much the script. (ie, I’m about to send off a script to the Script Editor that I hope will be, if not the last draft, then the one that we go into the table read with). Technically it’s probably the tenth draft, but I’m not really counting any more. (The “Cut ten pages” draft of the trip to Australia was the last one that felt like major surgery.) Steven Moffat came to my rescue when I felt like I couldn’t even pick it up again, and for that, he is a hero.
It hasn’t really changed that much. It just gets tighter and, I hope, more like itself. Slowly, draft by draft, it’s being turned up to eleven.
Anything that wasn’t moving the plot forward has gone. Lots of interesting chatty background conversations in the TARDIS, gone. Lines of dialogue that were fun in themselves but weren’t really needed? Gone. And the food scene? Very gone indeed. It’s been gone since draft six. 

So when I tell you that you should write a tiny 500 word essay 3 or 4 times before passing it in- don't complain. That is what writing is.