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- Guest post: This Is A First Draft Title And I Am OK With That
The most important thing to remember about a first draft is that you should never, ever worry about it being good enough.
The purpose of a first draft is to exist. That’s it. It is the initial, rough manifestation of your idea, and expecting it to be any more of that is going to cause pain down the line. A first draft does not have to be perfect, nor should you expect it to be. It does not need to be clean. It does not need to even be fully formed. It is just that first attempt to get something out of your head and onto the page.
Functionally, a first draft is the hunk of marble that will eventually turn into a statue. It is very important to remove that hunk of marble from the side of the mountain, to get it into the studio, and to set it up in a way that all the bits that aren’t statue-shaped can ultimately be chipped away through a series of iterative passes by the sculptor. Nobody except Gutzon Borglum ever thought that the finished sculpture happened in place. For everyone else, including Michelangelo, Bernini, and the anonymous geniuses who crafted classical Greek and Roman treasures, the process was the same: extract the rock and get it in a state where it could be worked on, then do the work.
What does that mean for a first draft? It means, first and foremost, that you don’t spend time or energy trying to make a first draft into a second draft or a final draft. That’s flying the airplane while you’re building it. The simple truth is, until you finish your story or novella or novel or script all the way through, you’re not going to know it well enough to be able to make the best changes and edits to the earlier sections. Making a change before you nail down the finale and lock in the results is an expression of hope that your climax isn’t going to surprise you and send ripples all r the way back through the manuscript. (And yes, this absolutely happens.)
Instead, the single best thing you can do is simply finish it. Write it all the way through, preferably from start to finish, though if you need to jump around that’s fine, too. Don’t worry about the stuff you know is wrong even as you type it, unless it’s keeping you from moving forward. Don’t go back and start fine-tuning dialogue in chapter 2 when you haven’t written The End yet, because getting granular too early leads you into a spiral of never-ending corrections that will never be good enough. And as a result, you will never return to your forward progress, and the piece will probably wither and die as you struggle to uncover the perfect adverb to place in the middle of chapter 3.
I’m joking a little here, but not entirely. It’s too easy to get caught up in trying to perfect an incomplete first draft when you can’t perfect it until you know the whole story. And the only way to know the whole story – how it ends, what happens to everyone, why they did the things they did – is to finish the draft.
Let’s go back to that block of marble. I think we can all agree that you can’t have a sculpture without that block of marble. It’s an essential part of the creative process. Which is why you need to think of your first draft as that block of marble. All the fine details will emerge later as you ply your craft on it and discover the marble’s grain and natural shape and whatever else metaphorical sculptors do. But even Michelangelo didn’t start by fine-tuning his David’s left ear. He hacked the stone out of the mountain, and then the rough figure out of the stone, and so on until the finished product emerged.
In the same way, finishing your first draft is pulling that initial block out of your mind and getting it out in front of you for you to work on. It’s a concrete starting point, a way to get the idea out where you can examine it from all angles externally instead of just chewing it over in your head. By the time you’ve finished that first draft, you have a sense of what works and what doesn’t, where you’ll need to fix and where you can build, and you’ll have a functional starting point for all your succeeding drafts up to publication.
Of course, the flip side of the coin is understanding that just because you finished a first draft does not mean you are done. Getting emotionally attached to your first draft in a way that blinds you to its faults and doesn’t let you honestly assess where it could be improved is as dangerous as not finishing. Just as you have to get all the way through before you start editing and correcting, getting all the way through doesn’t mean you are excused from editing and correcting. Be proud of the fact that you finished the first draft, but understand that it is only the first draft, and that you have many drafts ahead of you – some done in solitude, some reacting to beta reader feedback, and some hopefully to respond to an agent or editor – that you still must resolutely face. Hacking out that block of marble is a notable task, but it’s just one on the way to the finish line, and if you don’t understand that, you’ll never unlock the best form of what you’re writing.
So write your first drafts. Power through to the end, so that you can then take a deep breath and go back to start chiseling away all over again, with better direction and purpose. Be proud of what you have done, but recognize it for what it is, and don’t make it more or less than what it is.
An experienced writer of video games, fiction, and TTRPGs, Richard Dansky has worked on franchises from The World of Darkness to The Division to Star Trek. His most recent books are The Video Game Writer’s Guide to Surviving an Industry That Hates You and the modern fantasy/horror novel Ghosts of Smoke and Flame. A founding member of the IGDA’s Game Writing Special Interest Group, he was recently honored by them with their inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for Game Writing. You can find his work in venues such as PseudoPod, Space and Time, and Dark Yonder, and online at his Patreon. Richard lives in North Carolina in a house that is basically a library with a scotch bar and a bunch of Bigfoot souvenirs, and is the only working horror writer to have won PC Gamer Magazine’s Mission Pack of the Year award.
For more, check out his author website or his LinkedIn.