What Writing 100+ Books Taught Me About First Drafts
Hello, dear readers,
This is a topic I think is incredibly important for people who are just starting to write. When I was first learning how to write books, I remember constantly feeling dissatisfied with my own work. Why doesn't this sound the way I want it to? Why are all the books I'm reading so much better than what I'm writing? The answer was actually very simple: I was comparing the first draft of my manuscript to a published book that had already been written, revised, edited, proofread, and polished. That published book almost certainly didn't look like that in its first draft, and I think that's something many new writers forget.
You can't fairly compare a first draft to something that has already been polished multiple times. You don't know how many drafts that author went through before reaching the version you're holding. You don't know how long they've been writing, either. Experience plays a huge role in how strong your first drafts become, but no matter how experienced you are, your first draft is never going to be perfect.
And that's where a very common problem begins: editing while you're still writing. You start obsessing over tiny details, rewriting paragraphs, polishing sentences, and editing chapters before you've even finished the book. Eventually, you're moving painfully slowly, you still don't know exactly how the story ends, and somehow nothing ever feels finished.
It's important to remember that the first draft has one job: to be written. That's it. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be beautiful. It needs to exist.
Once you have the whole story in front of you, you can begin polishing it with much more precision. You know where the story was actually going. You know where it ended. You understand which details mattered and which ones didn't. That's especially important when you go back to add foreshadowing and clues, because now you know exactly what you're foreshadowing. You aren't blindly planting details and hoping they'll become useful later.
After writing more than 100 books, the way I look at first drafts has changed completely. I no longer expect a first draft to be beautiful. I expect it to show me the story.
The first draft shows me where the characters work and where they don't. It shows me where the pacing slows down, which scenes I thought would be important but ultimately lead nowhere, where information is missing, and where I've explained far too much. Sometimes it even shows me that an idea that looked brilliant in the outline simply doesn't work nearly as well once I turn it into an actual scene.
And that doesn't mean the first draft failed.
It means it did its job.
I think that's one of the most important things experience has taught me. Writing and editing are two different jobs. When I'm writing, I need to allow the story to move. When I'm editing, I can be ruthless. I can cut scenes, move chapters, rewrite dialogue, add foreshadowing, fix the pacing, and finally deal with that one sentence that's been annoying me for three weeks.
But first, I need to have a book to edit.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should never go backwards while drafting. If I discover a massive plot hole in Chapter Fifteen that makes the next ten chapters impossible, I'm not going to shrug and say, "Well, it's a first draft," and happily continue toward disaster. 😀 Experience helps you learn the difference between a problem that needs to be solved now and something that can safely wait until revisions.
And maybe that's one of the biggest differences between the way I wrote when I first started and the way I work today. It's not that my first drafts suddenly became perfect.
I simply stopped being afraid when they weren't.
After this many books, I know that a bad sentence can be rewritten. A weak scene can be strengthened. A chapter can be moved. A character can be developed further. Sometimes entire plotlines can disappear and something much better can take their place. But you can't edit a blank page.
So if you're currently writing your first book and comparing it to your favorite published novel, stop for a moment. You're not looking at that author's first draft. You're looking at the final result.
Give yourself the chance to create the material that can eventually become your final result. Write the ugly sentence. Leave the note in brackets. Keep going with the scene even when you already know you'll probably rewrite it later. You don't have to prove right now that you're capable of writing a brilliant book.
First, give yourself something you can turn into one.
If you’d like to follow the journey of the book I am writing and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:
But if you want to, you can see more about my work as a ghostwriter here:
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