What To Do When Your First Draft Sucks
I’m a big fan of one-draft writing. It forms part of a wider philosophy regarding professional writing put forth by sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein and referred to mostly as “Heinlein’s Rules:”
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What You Start
Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
In short, everything you write should be written with its release onto the market in mind. Heinlein was talking about short fiction, but it applies everywhere.
If you’re a professional writer, then you want to write as many publishable words as possible. If you mess around writing ten drafts for everything you write, that will be hundreds of hours that are unprofitable and that you’ll never get back.
So you must attempt to get better at one-draft writing.
Here’s an article on one draft writing.
However, sometimes things just don’t work out like you want them to.
Here are my thoughts on what to do when your first draft is not coming together.
First Things First: Sitting In Your Chair Doing Nothing Is NOTHING
So, so many writers fall into the trap of equating “work” with “sitting and thinking” or other variations on not doing anything.
Writer’s block is undone by sitting and writing. Nothing else. You aren’t a hero for struggling for nine months to create a single chapter of a book, you’re being sloppy.
If a chef took two hours to bring you a subpar burger, you wouldn’t say, “Gee… he must have really suffered for the art here” you’d say, “Get me a better burger and give me my money back.”
It’s the same with writing. You aren’t going to get over writer’s block by training yourself to not write.
No excuses, no caveats.
The first thing to do when you have a writing project that isn’t coming is write yourself into it.
Now, let’s assume you’re writing and you know your first draft is terrible. What do you do?
Keep Writing Even If Your First Draft Is Terrible
Many of my articles, sales letters and other stuff have started terribly. Some of them are still terrible at the opening. Browse the archives, take a look at some of the more obscure articles. The intros aren’t polished and could be better.
That’s because I couldn’t think of an opening and it took a while to get into the flow of the piece. This will often happen with any writing project.
If in doubt, keep going. You might have to edit one part later if it’s particularly weak, but you can’t stop writing. If you stop writing, then you’re probably going to have to write the whole thing again. If you keep going, then you’ll push through and probably the rest of your piece will be great once you get your brain trained to do what it needs to.
If It’s Still Not Coming… You Need More Knowledge Of Structure
If you are really stuck and your work is trailing off into more and more rubbish, then here’s what you need to do.
It’s not “hiring a story doctor” or “paying for an editing team” or “go on an expensive writer’s retreat” or whatever.
The problem isn’t with your writing. It’s with your ability to understand and recreate the form.
Take a sales letter for instance. When you’re new and you are still having to look up what comes next between a product reveal and a price drop, you’ll experience what you think of as “writer’s block” because you know those two things need to be in your letter but you can’t get the words to take you from one to the other.
This is not a problem with the words, it’s a problem with your structural understanding.
Same thing with a blog post or a short story or whatever.
It’s rarely the words, it’s with your understanding of the form.
So, if you repeatedly get stuck – especially at the same place across multiple projects – you need to go back and study the form of whatever you’re creating.
Read some of the top guys in your field. Make notes. Churn out copies of the specific feature you need to master.
Then go back to creating a draft and push beyond that point using your new knowledge.
Final Thoughts
Assume you’re able to get over your fear or inertia and put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking. What you write will not always be the best thing in the world. But where you become stronger than other writers is in the act of continuing when faced with this fact.
Most writers stop when they write bad words. If you push through, the words will get better and better as you go along.
If they don’t, consult the big issues. But most of the time you won’t need to.