“Your first draft is not a reflection of your talent. It’s a reflection of your COURAGE. The talent shows up in revision. The courage shows up in the willingness to write something terrible and keep going.”
— L.A. Walton, The Book Maven
I’m going to say this louder for the people in the back: YOUR FIRST DRAFT IS SUPPOSED TO BE BAD. Not just okay-bad. BAD-bad. Messy, inconsistent, rambling, contradictory, overwritten, underwritten, all-over-the-place bad. That’s NORMAL. That’s the PROCESS.
What Your First Draft Actually Is
| What You Think It Is | What It Actually Is |
| A test of your talent. | A test of your perseverance. |
| Something that should be readable. | Something that should be COMPLETABLE. |
| Close to the final product. | The raw material for the final product. |
| Evidence of your skill (or lack thereof). | Evidence of your bravery. |
| The thing people will judge. | The thing nobody will EVER see unless you want them to. |
The Hot Mess First Draft Manifesto
- Write forward, never backward. Don’t reread. Don’t revise. Don’t polish. Just move.
- If you don’t know a detail, skip it. Write [TK] or [RESEARCH LATER] and keep going.
- If a scene isn’t working, write ‘[SOMETHING HAPPENS HERE]’ and move to the next one.
- If the dialogue sounds weird, leave it. You’ll fix it in revision when you know your characters better.
- If you hate what you wrote today, congratulations. You wrote. That’s more than most people did.
Your Move, Creative
Set a timer for 30 minutes. Write as fast as you can without stopping, editing, or judging. When the timer goes off, you’ll have new material on the page. Ugly material. Beautiful, brave, ugly material that didn’t exist 30 minutes ago. That’s a first draft. That’s the process. That’s you being a writer.
Stop letting your stories stay stuck.
