There’s a secret about writing that every novice writer needs to hear: your first draft is supposed to be bad. Not just imperfect, not just messy. BAD bad. Its job is simply to exist, so you have something to work on.
It’s a block of raw material, a rough sketch, a first attempt at capturing something that is, by nature, difficult to put into words. The mistake many new writers make isn’t writing a bad first draft, it’s believing that a bad first draft is a failure.
First drafts are different from finished works in the same way that an empty house is different from a home. The pieces are there, the shape is all there. It has the potential to become a home. So, you move yourself into it, your furniture, your decorations, your life and your love.
Then it can start to become a home.
When writers expect their early work to resemble the polished books they admire, they’re forgetting just how much happens between a first draft and a finished novel.
A published book isn’t just the work of a single writer. Before it reaches shelves, a manuscript is read, critiqued, rewritten, and reshaped by multiple people—editors, proofreaders, beta readers, sometimes even legal teams. Whole chapters are cut. Sentences are rewritten dozens of times. Characters change names, personalities, entire fates. And after all of that, after months or even years of careful revision, most books still go to print with an error or two hiding somewhere in their pages.
So why do new writers expect perfection from their first attempts? Why do they hold themselves to an impossible standard that even bestselling authors can’t meet?
It’s a problem of expectations. We all read so much faster than we write (which can be painfully slow). Because we’ve taken SO DAMNED LONG to write the book, it SHOULD be good, right?
Wrong.
The job of the first draft is to exist. To tell the story, however badly. To get SOMETHING on the page that you can fix.
The real work of writing isn’t in getting the first draft right. It’s in returning to the mess you’ve made and shaping it into something better. It’s in recognising that every book on a shelf once existed as a clumsy, half-formed draft before it became what you see now. And it’s in understanding that no one else sees that draft but you, so there’s no reason to be ashamed of it.
A first draft is a beginning, nothing more. And the only way to make it better is to keep going.
If you stop swimming in the middle of a river, you’ll never get to see the far shore.
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Before I started to teach myself writing, I was a semi-pro photographer. This is where I first encountered what I have come to think of as The Comparison Trap.
As a photographer, you make a LOT of photos. Every photographer does this – a single finished image is selected from hundreds, maybe thousands of photos that came out of the camera. Some of them were botched, in terms of shutter speed, timing, lighting, exposure.. whatever. Those got discarded almost immediately.
That final image that was shown in the magazine or portfolio, that image went through multiple edit and refinement passes before it ever reached my eyes.
And me (idiot that I was) was comparing every image out of my camera to these finished, refined, published images.
Is it any wonder that my work fell short?
Writing is the same. You read a well-crafted book that has been refined by the author, drafted, re-written, edited, reviewed and edited again. Then it’s gone through (maybe) multiple flavours of editor (line editors, story editors and the like), maybe beta readers and sensitivity readers as well. They’ve all had their input, all bent their efforts to making the book better than it was when they first got their hands on it.
And here’s you (and me) comparing our first drafts to these finished, polished works.
Despite all these paid professional eyeballs, all these edit and review passes, we can STILL often find errors in the published books.
Even after all of that.
So, the lesson here is:
Cut yourself some slack. Tell the story that only you can tell.
After it’s told, then you can go back and make it better. Then you can improve it, you can make your words sing off the page.
You can help your readers to make your words sing in their souls.