Write That Bad 1st Draft

 

We’ve all been there, sitting in front of our screen, thinking, ‘I’m going to write the best first draft ever.’ And every time we are finished with it, you guess it, it is not the best first draft ever. You’d most likely read through it and think, ‘this is so bad, why did I think I could write.’

I can tell you for sure, every writer has done that, me included. No matter if it’s a classmate of yours or a high-paying author, I can guarantee you that the first draft will be bad. The whole point of the first draft is to simply have the story, that has been bubbling inside your mind, written. You might have heard this before, but the first draft is there to exist. 

Many writers have many works in progress which never ever see the ending for simply fearing how bad the writing will be. Trust me when I say this, there will be spelling and grammar errors, there will be scenes that just do nothing for the plot, and you might even have a character who changes name throughout the novel by accident. But that is the whole point of a first draft, to be able to see everything you have thought be on paper. 
A first draft allows you to see the plot holes that are existing, what works well, and if the flow between points makes sense. The first draft gives you the chance to clearly see your plot, and to understand how the start reaches the end. Without writing the first draft, you are standing at a frozen point in time, wondering what will happen if you do sit down and write the first draft no matter how terrible those sentences are. If all you do is think and never actually complete what you want to do, you will never be able to see the potential that lives within you. 

My first draft of my romance novel, Nobody Compares, looks completely different from how it looks now in its sixth draft. The start has changed, what feels like, five-hundred-times. Scenes have been deleted, added, and changed. Characters have been merged into one. But without that first draft, a novel that I am super proud of writing would not exist the way it looks now. If I listened to my thoughts that what I was writing was painfully awful, Daisy and Aaron would not be here. 

Think about it this way, the first draft is in some ways a blueprint, the foundation of a house. It is what is needed to build a life in this world of yours. 

What to take from this is simply to write. You might be sitting there, staring at your screen, not knowing how to write a scene because all you want is for it to be perfect. Guess what. It's not going to be perfect. Sure, maybe take a quick ten-minute break, and get some fresh air. But even when you have written a scene in your first draft which you believe it's perfect, during your revisions between drafts, you will most likely think, 'hang on, this is not working, let me change it slightly.'

Write that bad first draft, because it is needed and it will never be perfect and ready to be sent to an agent. Because no matter how great your first draft is, you are a writer, and therefore, you'll be thinking about how to develop your story the moment you write, The End.

Don't be afraid that writing your first draft will make you believe that you're a horrible writer. Instead, be afraid of not trying. Because not trying is a lot worse than reading your first draft and cringing at sentences that you thought were good. At the end of the day, you can always improve.

A first draft is not the final outcome, it is just the first step to a beautiful masterpiece.