One of my bugbears about writing is the editing process. I'd much rather get it right first time, rather than chop this and change that afterwards.
How can one make draft 1 publishable? I suppose it depends on how you define draft 2.
Maybe, now just maybe, you won't have to start the writing afresh, but you'll definitely have to edit things when you're done. If there really is a way to avoid doing that altogether, it would involve editing as you go, which is discouraged for several reasons:
* You can't see every problem in the moment (indeed, whether something works or not often depends on what you've not even written yet);
* "X is a problem" is in some cases subjective, and you have to see what readers think to know what reactions your work induces and how you'd like to change that;
* You'll find it so hard to be happy with what you're writing it'll slow you to a crawl known as the tyranny of the blank page.
Hereafter I'll assume your aim is "don't start from scratch", which is much less ambitious. I know from experience often even that's not achievable. I'll mention two other things before I continue quoting you:
* Many writers don't realise that most first drafts are too long (in fact, some would argue even most published novels may be too long). Therefore, editing a draft is often more about what you lose than what new material you write (or old material you tweak, as is often necessary around the edges of anything you may cut). Of course, excising material is still "hard work", albeit not perhaps the kind of hard work self-editing writers first think of.
* I write in LyX, software that allows me to hide anything I "remove" so it never needs to be gone. 487
This somewhat blurs the line as to whether I'm "redrafting" a radically overhauled work that's still in the same file.
Other industries would not tolerate the rather curious approach writers have to the craft. Imagine a car manufacturer saying to their workers 'oh, just build the car - we'll fix it up when you've finished.' No - there are rules, systems and procedures in place that ensure that when the car reaches the end of the conveyer belt, it is ready to be delivered to the customer.
Before the purchasable car exists, both prototype cars and pre-car ideas such as blueprints exist. The writer's equivalent of R&D includes planning a firs draft, a summary of readers' feedback on it, and planning a redraft based on such feedback.
But don't get hung up on the example (every metaphor breaks down somewhere). I'm asking here for positive steps we can take to make it more likely that our 'first drafts' are good enough to be published.
If I recall correctly, you've read a few books advising people on how to write. Is obeying all those rules (except where you're sure you should be breaking them) enough to make draft 1 shine? Probably not, and it's especially unlikely for an author's first novel. (I mention that for future readers of this page, not the OP.) I know from experience that most if not all of a beta reader's feedback isn't "you broke rule X" (with or without their knowledge there is such a rule), but "Y isn't working in this story".
Luckily, fixing that often means removing things rather than writing a lot that's new. One of my critique partners helped me identify 10,000 words that needed to leave a 90k manuscript, and it was surprisingly easy to make what remained work without them; and when she saw it, I'd already removed a lot of other words whose not belonging was even more obvious. How did I help her? By realising there were whole characters she needed to lose. 487