Tips to help survive draft one with your sanity (mostly) intact
For many beginners, the biggest obstacle to finishing a first book is a simple, self-inflicted delusion: the belief that a first draft should actually be good.
It’s a nasty trap. Like thinking your newborn will emerge speaking three languages and playing the cello. Charming idea, entirely unrealistic.
Most early writers suffer not from lack of talent, but from a catastrophic misunderstanding of what a first draft is supposed to be. We expect excellence where only existence is required.
A First Draft Is Not a Book (Yet)
Here’s the thing no one tells writing beginners. A first draft is not a book. It’s the larval stage of a book. It’s something that might someday become a book if it eats its vegetables, receives steady emotional support, and survives your editing.
But we type “Chapter One,” immediately imagining ourselves accepting the Booker Prize, and then we go on to judge every sentence like an Olympic gymnastics panel.
So we stress. We panic. Some of us cry. (Okay, that one might just be me.) We edit the life out of every paragraph as if it owes us rent money. Meanwhile, our future selves are quietly drinking coffee and whispering, “For the love of … C’mon, James. Just finish the draft.”
A First Draft Can Look Like a Monkey Wrote It. Mine Did
When I started writing my first novel, I fully expected the story to pour out of me like champagne — sparkling, stylish, likely overpriced. Instead, my draft resembled something a gibbon might produce after discovering an abandoned laptop at the dump.
Characters swapped names without warning. Plot holes grew large enough to house a family of six. Adjectives clung to sentences like barnacles.
And yet I kept polishing the first chapter. And polishing. And polishing. Weeks later, I had twenty pages and a spiritual crisis. Chapter Two had packed its bags. Chapter Three left a note. Chapter Four entered witness protection.
I eventually realized that I wasn’t writing a book. I was perfecting procrastination. And the only thing I was finishing was my will to live. First drafts aren’t about perfection. They’re about existence.
DON’T Expect Perfection
Even your second draft may not be good. But it’ll be better than the first one. And that’s the point.
You start off with scaffolding (rickety, mismatched, likely illegal in three jurisdictions) not marble countertops you’d proudly show guests. If you imagine your draft sitting beside Margaret Atwood or Zadie Smith, please stop before someone gets hurt.
First drafts are the museum sketches where the artist hasn’t figured out where the limbs belong. Necessary, but in no universe suitable for public display.
DO Write Ugly
Write ugly. Write messy. Write like you’re wearing oven mitts and the room is on fire.
In your first draft, you’re testing ideas, breaking things, creating plot holes later drafts will have to sew back together with emotional twine and pure hope. Mess is the point. Chaos is the method. Glory comes later.
DON’T Write and Edit at the Same Time
Editing your sentences while drafting is the creative equivalent of stopping a marathon every five steps to tie your shoes, stretch, rehydrate, adjust your playlist, whisper a prayer, and inspect your reflection in a shop window. You’ll never reach the finish line, and you’ll definitely hate running. In the same way, editing while drafting kills momentum. It kills morale. It kills your belief that your book deserves to exist.
DO Write Recklessly, Edit Later
Draft One is the stage where you shout your story onto the page before your brain has time to file a complaint.
Write like someone who’s had too much caffeine and is narrating events live. Let scenes wander. Let characters say shocking things. Let metaphors get weird enough to alarm professionals.
Elegance comes later — Draft Two, Three, and the mysterious Fourth Draft, which is where you finally admit Chapter Seven must be humanely removed. Draft One is detonation. Revision is cleanup.
DON’T Give Up When the Honeymoon Dies
Around the 30–40% mark, something tragic happens. The magical glow fades. The story stops feeling like destiny and starts feeling like assembling flat-pack furniture using instructions translated backward from ancient hieroglyphics.
This is normal. Every writer hits the swampy middle, where scenes resist cooperation and characters behave like actors who skipped rehearsal.
Keep going. Momentum isn’t born at the start. It’s forged here, amid the mutiny.
DO Have a Plan to Reignite Your Spark
When the slump hits, you need tricks. Skip ahead to a scene you’re excited about. Introduce a complication. Let a character make a terrible decision. The job is not to feel inspired. The job is to keep moving until inspiration stops sulking and returns.
DON’T Waste Weeks Searching for the Perfect Writing Method
New writers can waste entire months researching the “perfect” method: snowflake, beat sheet, index cards, colour-coded spreadsheets, tarot, smoke signals, calling upon ancient spirits — whatever.
All methods work. None work perfectly. And absolutely none of them will write the book for you, no matter how aesthetically pleasing your new Notion template is.
At some point, research becomes procrastination wearing very clever disguises.
DO Pick Any Method and Start
Your story does not care about your planning anxiety. It doesn’t care which outlining system you choose or whether your character arcs are aligned with the moon phases.
It cares that you sit down and type words.
Pick a method, any method, and begin. Adjust later. The story wants to be written, not consulted like a board of directors.
DON’T Fall Into the Quitting Cycle
Many beginners fall into the lethal loop: Start → Struggle → See a shiny new idea → Abandon → Repeat → Emotional ruin
Somewhere out there is a graveyard of your unfinished novels, sighing heavily and forming a support group. Don’t join them.
DO Finish Something (Even If It’s Weird)
Finish your draft. Even if the plot gets bizarre. Even if Chapter Four openly contradicts Chapter Two. Even if you’re starting to dislike everyone involved, including yourself.
Finishing teaches discipline. Rewriting teaches craft. Polishing the same twenty pages teaches nothing except how to resent your keyboard.
The Survival Summary
Write ugly, not perfect. Separate writing from editing. Expect the mid-draft slump. Pick a method, any method, and commit. And above all: finish.
If you do these consistently, your story will transform from “What is this creature?” to “Oh. Oh, this might actually be something.”
Birthing a Novel
Writing a first draft is less like birthing a novel and more like birthing a confused forest creature that may or may not grow into something majestic once fed and groomed. It will snarl at you. It will bite. It will wander off for days. But if you stick with it long enough, one day it will look vaguely like literature.
And when that day comes, you will look back at your terrible, patchwork, unhinged first draft with unexpected affection — the way people fondly recall their teenage years despite all photographic evidence.
Finish the draft. Embrace the chaos. Trust the process. Because somewhere beneath the mess, your future book is waving at you enthusiastically with one badly-drawn hand.
This essay is one of a collection of pieces documenting the bedlam involved in writing and self-publishing my ongoing genre fiction series: The Misjudgements of Andy MacKay, available on Amazon.