After The First Draft,
I do several things. I often have ten drafts (of novels that run over 120,000 words). Make sure you have a separate backup of your work before you begin changing it, every time. My backups have the date & time of the backup in the name.
Second Draft, Identify and fix non-creative errors.
My first time through I am looking for obvious errors, in grammar, in confusing pronoun usage (usually with two of the same gender interacting; "She didn't think she was right". Is that Alice didn't think Betty was right, or vice versa, or Alice didn't think Alice was right, or Betty didn't think Betty was right?
Also errors like attributing a line of dialogue to the wrong character, or I've found unfinished lines, or formatting errors like failing to indent or quote dialogue, italicize thought, failing to page break between chapters, and so on.
During this first read through, I will also leave myself notes in the text. I don't use square brackets in my fiction writing, so my notes are for creative tasks or errors I notice. For example, [Too much exposition], or [you said 'breathless' 3 times in two pages], or [Repeating yourself, you explained this just a while ago]. I will leave notes like [Shorten, maybe Delete].
A similar note is [Why?]; short for "consequences?", which I put on passages that I am not sure are necessary to the story at all. Perhaps they can be cut. Particularly if what I wrote has no real consequences later in the story, it doesn't illustrate a character trait, or isn't important to a plot point. This stuff may have been pointless wandering when I was writing, or world building that isn't necessary (describing how flax is turned into fine linen, fascinating and completely irrelevant).
I don't want to get lost in a creative mode in this second draft; not even the surgery of deleting stuff and ensuring the narrative still flows. I want to correct non-creative errors.
Third Draft, Characters.
This is for character consistency and voice. This is focused on character actions, attitudes, expressions and dialogue. For me (a discovery writer), my characters at the end of the story are not exactly the same characters I began with. For example, just due to opportunities along the way in developing my stories, my main character (a girl with a deadly serious job) became quite funny, and I realized she was doing that as a kind of pressure relief valve from her job. On the Second draft I made that part of her personality from the beginning. The same thing goes for the speaking quirks I give my characters. I don't use accents (I hate them!) but all my main characters do get some kind of quirk. They sometimes interrupt themselves, they use a common expression nobody else uses, or one we've heard but too often, like their default. I once knew a fellow student that used "Sweet!" so often it made me have to suppress laughing out loud. I know a professor that, even talking to himself, uses "What?" once or twice a minute. ("So I go to the grocery then what? I go to the bank, then what? ... That's it, I go home.") A speaking quirk may be a tendency to think before answering; or a tendency to answer vaguely or cautiously. Highly logical people can have a tendency toward pedantism, to use weakening qualifiers, e.g. they can't just say "Everybody wants to live!", they feel forced to qualify because obviously some people commit suicide so NOT everybody wants to live, and they think, "The vast majority of people want to live!", but how can they be sure of that? They can't, so better say, "To my knowledge, the vast majority of people want to live."
Other quirks are using some word incorrectly, or 'rewriters' that like to give somebody a better word than whatever they are using. I don't want to hammer these quirks too hard, it becomes comical. But I do want to use them every once in a while, often enough to make the voices different.
In any case, even though the incidents of the book may change the characters significantly, I don't expect them to change their speech, reflexive gestures, expressions or humor, or their courage, or to whom they are sexually attracted, etc.
There is some "soul" of the character that should stay the same, and I don't know what it is until the end of the book! So go back and do whatever soul repair must be done in the beginning.
Fourth Draft. Sensory: Smells, Colors, Touch.
Non-emotional senses. What are my characters seeing, hearing, feeling on their skin, feeling in their gut? What is the temperature? Are they sweating? Are they chilled to shivering or numbness? (Would that make them clumsy?) Does their head ache? Do their joints or muscles ache? Are they sleep deprived, hungry, feeling weak or ill?
Coloring: Am I presenting a world in shades of gray, or do the things we see have actual colors? Is it a tree, or a tree with blond bark, speckled black? Are the leaves green, or the fresh new green of early spring, or the deep dark green of late summer?
What are the best colors to focus on for the mood of the scene? They should be different if we are arguing over finances, or literally trying to kill somebody, or if we snuck away from the campground for a tryst in the woods by the river.
How about smells? The world can stink, people and breath can stink. We can smell perfume, too strong or pleasant. Unlike the movies, in a novel we can show smells, and sometimes how something or somebody smells can set the mood for a scene. Like speech quirks, I don't want to hammer every sense in every scene, complete coverage is not the goal. But sounds, smells, and colors can be useful IF they resonate with the mood of the scene and emotions of the POV character(s).
Fifth Draft, Address Notes, and Map to the Three Act Structure (3AS).
I go through to address my notes (and delete them of course), just "find" a "[" or whatever marker you used to make your notes. Here is where I may delete text, or rewrite things, based on the notes.
At the same time, I keep notes on paper for the 3AS milestone points.
Here is a link, How To Plan Your Novel Using The Three Act Structure.
Although I don't plan my novel using the 3AS, this link does a good job of breaking a novel down into 27 equal length "chapters", nine blocks of three chapters. So each block is 11.1% of the story. You don't have to follow this religiously; but, within 2-3% (2000 to 3000 words in a 100,000 word novel), these are good milestone markers for how commercially successful fiction really does happen to turn out.
For example, the first block is about the Normal World of the MC, and they say it occupies 11.1% of the story (by word count), and the "inciting incident" that sets things off for the MC will occur around halfway through that. I personally use 10% and 5% as my milestones. There are many descriptions of the 3AS and I am used to using multiples of 5%.
So now, as I add and delete stuff to arrive at my near-final text, I can also see how well my story maps to the 3AS, just by these word count percentages. My story already has the plot elements, the 3AS just tells me roughly where those plot points should fall in a good story. The 3AS is a distillation of averages for most stories, and to me, like most averages, my story can be a reasonable amount more or less than the average, depending on circumstances. Likewise, I don't necessarily have to abide by the number of obstacles or conflicts that occur; but as far as the purpose of the nine big blocks in that description, the 3AS is a good guideline.
The real point of this exercise is to identify where my story is too flabby, and where it is too skinny. Any large deviation over the 3AS average percentages is too flabby, any large deviation under the 3AS average is too skinny. This is how I choose where to cut and add. If I do change the length, (as adding sensory information does in a minor way) I go ahead and do that from front-to-back, "finalizing" the first block, then the second, and so on.
Sixth Draft: Repeat Until Clean.
I read it through again, trying hard to not change a thing, not perfect anything, not add anything. I have to guard against OCD. If I fail because something is still just too bad, then I try to address those things with as non-invasive a surgery as possible, adding or subtracting as few words as possible, so I don't change my block counts.
That's my process, tailored for me, how I write, and specifically for the types of things I often forget to do in the first draft. You should personalize it, you can do these in different orders, add your own stages for things you forget to do in the first draft, break them up into different passes if you like.
I do recommend you do something like this for what is important to you in the writing. Stephen King says he does three full-book passes after the first draft; Perhaps he combines some of these steps, or doesn't forget them like I do.
