Some writers, when attacking their first drafts, condense them, and their stories shrink as they mature, like fruit becoming jam. Other writers have a different method, and for them, first drafts grow like coral reefs.

I learned along ago that I was one of the latter sort. In fact, over the years, I’ve discovered that my process has very clear parameters.

Though my editing consists as much of cutting out as of adding in, my second drafts tend to be approximately 50% larger than my first drafts, and the second draft I completed yesterday was no exception. A first draft of 14 pages, or 2,642 words, had been massaged into a second draft of 22 pages, or 4,638 words.

Other recent short stories had the following leaps in word count from the first to second draft: 2,598 to 4,991; 3,901 to 7,975; 5,236 to 7,515.

As for subsequent drafts, I usually never end up adding more than a few hundred words to the length as I edit the third draft, and the fourth and further drafts either maintain the same length or are slightly shorter than the third. I realized long ago that’s just the way my brain works, and have noticed very few exceptions to this.

So—what’s your method? Are you a taker-outer or a putter-inner?