Your first draft is not your book.
It’s the bones, and the flesh, it’s the shape and maybe it’s the start of the structure. It’s not finished, it’s not whole, and it’s definitely not beautiful. Yet.
It’s not meant to be. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s not supposed to be publishable. It’s not even supposed to be good.
Your first draft is raw material. It’s the marble before the sculpture. The sketch before the ink. The rough cut before editing. It’s the version of your story that exists because it has to—before anything better can.
Too many writers freeze because their first draft doesn’t read like a finished novel. But here’s the truth: no first draft does. Not even the ones from seasoned, published authors. The finished novel only exists because of the messy, inconsistent, overwritten, undercooked one that came before.
A first draft has one job: to exist.
It’s there so you can figure things out on the page. Discover the story. Meet your characters properly. Find out what they want and why they can’t have it. You might write five thousand words just to realise your real story starts at word five thousand and one.
I often do this—write the first couple of chapters, then reach the point where the story actually starts. So, later, I’ll pull those chapters out of the manuscript (and save them elsewhere—I never throw anything away). They don’t need to be there, but I needed to write them so I could tell the story that mattered.
That’s not failure. That’s the process.
Sometimes, you’ll write a first draft that feels like a disaster. Sometimes it won’t even feel like writing—just a long, chaotic conversation between your brain and your keyboard. But it’s still progress. Still part of the journey.
Your first draft is not your book.
My drafts are littered with notes to myself, ranging from a simple [^] (which is a marker to myself that I need to go back to something earlier in the book and fix or add something), to a more fully fleshed out note, along the lines of “[This contradicts what Esme said earlier. Is she lying now? Or was she lying then? Or do I change that?]”
I always enclose these notes in square brackets, throwing them in as I write rather than going back and making the change or the addition straight away. These are markers on the path for when I review, things I don’t want to forget—but they don’t need to be written right now.
I don’t want these little issues to interrupt my flow.
It’s messy, but that’s fine. It’s rough, and it’s ugly, and that’s OK.
Let it be rough. Let it be wrong (but if you notice where it’s wrong, make a mark there). Let it ramble if that’s the way it falls out of you, word-count is a concern for later.
Just finish it.
Tell the story.
The second draft—that’s where the book begins.