Embrace the Suck: Why a Bad First Draft Should be Celebrated
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You can’t edit a blank page. Let’s say that again, you can’t edit a blank page.
Many writers get tripped up while drafting by trying to perfect what they’re writing as they write it. While a rare few authors compose their text and edit in their heads before even putting pen to paper, most of us can type—and delete—with ease.
Today, we’re going to champion the merits of writing imperfectly so you can break through your writer’s block and actually finish that book you’ve “always wanted to write.”
1. The Creative Brain vs. the Analytical Brain
When drafting, you use your creative and imaginative faculties; when you edit, you need to switch gears to use analytical and critical skills. Both are important to hone as a writer, but they can sometimes get in each other’s way. This often shows up in writers who are hyper-critical. These are the ones who spend hours placing and removing commas from one sentence, sifting through thesaurus entries, or falling down research rabbit-holes to ensure a single fact is historically accurate…only to cut it later.
To free yourself from this tortured writing experience, it’s important to give yourself some grace in three important ways.
First, don’t delete content as you’re drafting. You can, of course, correct a typo as you’re going, but don’t try to edit your work when you’re in a writing flow. If you struggle to restrain your inner critic, try using tools that limit how much of your screen you can see at a time, turn off your spell checkers and grammar checkers when drafting, or even employ timers that penalize you if you hesitate too long. The goal is to allow the first draft to be messy.
Second, a first draft is not what gets published. If you worry that what you’ve written is terrible, take comfort that no one needs to see this version. You are just vomiting all your ideas on the page and you can clean them up later. Sometimes drafting is just telling yourself the story. Sometimes it’s fleshing out an outline. Accept that it will be full of plot holes and grammatical errors and that’s okay, because a draft is not the final version. But if you don’t finish an initial draft, you can never revise your ideas to make them better.
Third, splitting up the drafting and editing process will make you more efficient at both. Think about trying to juggle a lot of tasks at once: you probably aren’t able to do any of them as effectively or skillfully as when you cut out distractions and focus on just one task at a time. In terms of writing, your inner critic is the distraction, and you’ll need to put it on mute until you get far enough in your draft to have something worth assessing and improving.
2. ‘Done’ Is Better than ‘Perfect’
Many authors talk about the great idea they have for a book, or they even start their book but, dissatisfied with their opening, rework it over and over and never finish their manuscript. You can’t do anything with an unwritten idea!
Even if you are a skilled and seasoned writer, even if you self-edit and revise your manuscript, it’s impossible to catch every instance on your own—and you shouldn’t expect to. That’s why editors exist, after all. Instead of expecting perfection, focus on a finish line.
For the first draft, your goal should just be getting all the key scenes and story onto the page. If you’re working from an outline, flesh out each scene (whether you write linearly or jump around). If you’re following a story structure, hit each beat. You may want to have a target word count in mind based on your genre or readership’s expectations. Write until you hit that goal.
This draft will likely be messy. Pacing may be bumpy, characterization may be inconsistent, plot threads may have been dropped part way through, and themes may be amorphous — if they exist at all. That’s perfectly okay. Consider your first draft as the hewn marble from which your book will be carved.
Now you can activate that inner critic to review what you have written. You may have parts that you hate — a key sign they need some revision — and other parts you love. Make a plan to tackle the big stuff first; it will save you time in revising later. Maybe you’ll call in critique partners or a writing coach, but approach this draft as a foundation for future work. It’s not meant to be perfect yet, it just has to exist so you can get closer to your goals.
For the second draft, you can fill in the blanks, clear up confusing language, and tidy the obvious typos and errors you spot on the page. You might seek out an editor or beta readers — but none of these next steps are possible if you don’t finish writing your story down first.
3. Try Sandbox Writing
Sandbox writing is explorative. Testing out a scene from different perspectives, cutting-and-pasting the order of events for how it changes their impact or intrigue, playing with dialogue or writing styles to hone a point of view — all are ways to explore what the shape of your writing might look like, how it might sound, and what kind of information you have to tell your reader.
Books like House of Leaves or Cloud Atlas play boldly with multiple “sources” to showcase the differences in these writing styles and subject matter; together they create impactful and inventive wholes. While your goal with storytelling may be more self-contained or linear, if drafting out of order keeps you motivated, inspired, or enables you to make transitional connections you might not otherwise have come up with, feel free to explore as you draft.
Not every word you write needs to make it into the published book. You can always trim the bits that don’t fit later. As warm-up writing exercises and pantsers have long demonstrated, sometimes your best ideas come from playing around.
Rest assured, content you ultimately cut is not wasted writing time; you learn as much about your book from what it doesn’t need as you do about what it should contain. Besides, that sandbox writing helps refine your authorial voice and flesh out your characters along the way. You might even find that by the time you get to the end of your draft, you have a stronger idea of how the rest of it should look, sound, and read.
Some of this advice might feel easier said than done at first, but being kind to yourself as you undertake a courageous and creative writing journey requires practice. Give yourself that grace, set achievable goals, save editing for later, and you’ll be able to transmit your idea into tangible words.
Out of a thousand writers, only 30 will actually finish their draft and only 6 will actually publish it. If you want to be one of those 6, it all starts with a messy first draft.
Astra Crompton (she/they) is an eclectic writer, editor, and illustrator with over twenty-five years of publishing experience. Her work has been published in anthologies, table-top RPG books, magazines, and in several novels. They have also successfully completed NaNoWriMo six times and counting. Astra is currently the Editing & Illustrations Coordinator at FriesenPress, where they manage, coordinate, and vet FriesenPress’s industry-leading editing and illustrations teams.
