Writing first drafts: 10 ideas to reach final drafts

Writing first drafts is the stage of the writing process many authors find daunting. Read ten ideas and strategies to stay focused, reach your writing goals, and make this part of your writing process work for you.

First draft to final draft: 10 ideas to try

Let’s explore how to write a first draft of a novel or story, plus ways to make subsequent drafts focused, intention-lead improvements:

Prewriting before writing first drafts

‘But I’m a pantser!’ you may exclaim. Prewriting is a broad term for the first stage of the writing process, though. It is malleable and allows finding a pre-drafting approach that feeds your own creativity.

We’ve explored the different types of prewriting you can do, but to summarize, it includes pre-draft activities such as:

• Story planning and outlining
• Using brainstorming, freewriting and other idea-expanding techniques
• Creating character ideas (or fleshing them out) using questionnaires and other brainstorming techniques
• Doing extensive or initial research to understand the subject areas of your story better
• Reverse outlining before you begin a second draft (outlining between drafts to get a condensed view of what you’ve already written)

Why do prewriting (and make it an essential part of your drafting process)?

1. You may find ideas and subtopics or subplots you may not have otherwise thought of in the process of asking questions.
2. Prepare to start drafting: It’s arguably easier to draft with confidence when you have some idea of where you’re going (there’s still freedom in a loose plan).
3. Sense-checking any contradictions or head-scratching plot developments in your story before you start. A summary view makes it easier to think about large-picture movement and story development.

Prolific New Adult/contemporary fiction author Colleen Hoover said of prewriting;

I always outline my books, but I’ve never stuck to an outline. Basically, I’m a wannabe planner, but am 100% a pantser. It does help to make outlines I’ll never use, though. Sometimes while I write the outline, it takes me in a direction I wouldn’t have thought of if I didn’t waste time outlining, so it’s not a complete loss.

Colleen Hoover, via Goodreads in answer to a reader’s question, 2020.

Draft stories the way that works for you

There’s no single approach to writing a first draft.

Take, for example, the highly specific process Italo Calvino describes to The Paris Review:

My pages are always covered with canceling lines and revisions. There was a time when I made a number of handwritten drafts. Now, after the first draft, written by hand and completely scrawled over, I start typing it out, deciphering as I go. When I finally reread the typescript, I discover an entirely different text that I often revise further. Then I make more corrections. On each page I try first to make my corrections with a typewriter; I then correct some more by hand.

Italo Calvino, in ‘The Art of Fiction No. 130’, interviewed by William Weaver, Damien Pettigrew, 1992.

Many authors prefer not to draft like Calvino, preferring to leave corrections and revisions until the entire draft is complete (more on reasons not to stop to edit if you can help it below). As for writing longhand, you either find that helps or impedes your flow.

Which method you choose depends on what you feel comfortable with.

Does reviewing and making corrections as you go discourage you, making you feel daunted? Make you doubt what you’ve written? Then turn your font color to match your page background so that you can’t edit as you go.

Change the color back only before saving your document until the next writing session.

This is one simple method to force yourself to keep going until your final draft rather than derail process with mid-flow rewriting.

Use writing drafts as a kind of prewriting

It is common to divide the writing process into five stages:

1. Prewriting – outlining, planning, research.
2. Drafting – turning summary ideas into sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters.
3. Revising – rewriting, adding in, taking out, re-sequencing.
4. Editing – correcting, developing, polishing, improving
5. Publishing – formatting, publishing, designing (covers), promoting.

While this five-stage idea of writing is a useful shorthand, the truth is there is often passage back and forth between stages. Sometimes the draft leads you back into research. Sometimes post-publication reception necessitates revised editions (the 50th anniversary HarperCollins edition of The Lord of the Rings included 400 corrections!).

The point of this is to say that although a first draft may feel like a final draft, rewriting is where many stories come to life.

In Now Novel’s online critique groups, members have shared extracts from consecutive drafts of work-in-progress. The difference is often night and day. So try a ‘draft zero’ – a quicker draft that gets the bones of your story into something resembling a complete skeleton.

This is often referred to as a ‘discovery draft’. Sir Terry Pratchett describes it as a process of closing in on what you mean to say:

My writing, at least for the first draft, is entirely instinctive as I watch the movie in my head and only during the second draft do I close in on what I mean to say.

Sir Terry Pratchett, in ‘Inaugural Professorial Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, 4 November 2010’ in A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected non-fiction , 2014.

Schedule your drafting sessions

How do you stick to your writing goals, especially when drafting and you’re in the thick of narrative unfolding, accumulating?

A schedule might not be something you always manage to stick to, but studies have found that simply writing your goals down makes it more likely you’ll achieve them.

Drafting a work of fiction longer than an essay or short story may feel particularly Sisyphean (like a task that can never be completed, named after the figure from Greek mythology condemned to roll a boulder up a hill).

For this reason, try to:

• Keep drafting sessions shorter with breaks – the pomodoro technique and other time-management tools (even just setting a timer for half an hour at a time) may help
• Keep writing goals attainable (SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based). For example, try writing 250 words within half an hour to start and adjust writing session goals according to what you can manage comfortably

Habit-building and decision-making guru James Clear shared several authors’ writing routines. These gems from Henry Miller are particularly apt for the drafting stage of the writing process:

Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.

Henry Miller, quoted by James Clear in ‘The Daily Routines of 12 Famous Writers’, accessed November 2022.

Choose a focus for each draft

Drafting with purpose is helpful to maintain the feeling that you are getting closer to the finish line.

Choosing a focus for your draft (whether it’s solving a single character’s arc, getting research correct, or adding descriptive detail) may help make the work you do during your second draft (or a subsequent one) precise.

Australian author Colleen McCullough (whose The Thorn Birds sold over 30 million copies) described choosing a focus for her drafts thus:

Once I’ve got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I’ll check my research.

Colleen McCullough, quoted by Writer’s Write, available here.

Avoid common drafting don’ts

One of the most often stated pieces of advice for the drafting phase is this: Don’t stop to edit.

There’s good reason for this. First drafts aren’t meant to be tidy, polished, word-perfect. They serve broader purposes (remember Pratchett: Close in on what you mean to say).

[In these articles, I find the headings first – this gives me a sense of the piece’s scope and helps me close in on secondary topics – ed’s note.]

Other first draft don’ts:

• Don’t compare yourself to other writers
• Avoid sharing your work until you’re ready to hear feedback (and can separate the useful from what doesn’t serve you if using peer critique)

It takes bravery to share a first draft (or even a final draft) for critique – the right crit circle will pay attention to your intentions and be constructive in their suggestions.

Steal moments to draft wherever you can

For writing a first draft or a rewrite, you don’t need to be tied to one device or approach. You might write some longhand, some in Word or Google Docs, and collate later. You might even write fragments in a notes app on your phone, email these to yourself, and cut-paste into your larger active draft document later.

In a Now Novel writing webinar, writing coach Romy Sommer shared how she wrote parts of her debut novel while waiting in her car on the school run.

Her anecdote shows how sometimes, the stolen moments are what you have. You can make sufficient progress using them towards a substantial first draft.

Write the messiest first draft you need

Many writers are INFP-T types (the ‘T’ stands for ‘turbulence’).

Some characteristics of this personality type include:

• Tending to view mistakes – or rather, ideals not matching reality/outcomes – as failures
• Tending towards less optimistic anticipations about the outcome of endeavors (such as writing drafts)

There is liberation in embracing that drafting is the messiest stage of the writing process. There will be typos and plot holes. Will be ‘What on earth was I thinking?’, head-scratching moments.

A first draft gives you great freedom to try other ways of organizing and teasing out ideas.

Jennifer Egan describes the value of allowing yourself a wretched first draft:

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.

Jennifer Egan, quoted in Writing With Quiet Hands: How to Shape Your Writing to Resonate with Readers by Paula Munier.

Vladimir Nabokov is famous for writing drafts on numbered index cards he could then move around and reshuffle into different sequences.

This helped him unlock different pathways and combinations of scenes for the narrative. Freedom is messy but fun, too, the way play is.

[You can also brainstorm and develop ideas in easy steps in our story dashboard and play with associations and ideas.]

Decide when you need feedback to progress

Between writing a first draft and subsequent drafts, you may want to get external perspective on what’s working in your story, and what isn’t working as well (and why).

An experienced reader such as a beta reader or editor familiar with your genre may be helpful at this stage.

Useful types of feedback between drafts include:

• Manuscript assessments/evaluations – a process preceding developmental editing or copy-editing
• Peer critique in a writing circle – make sure your writing circle gives the kind of feedback you want (you can always lurk a little first in an online writing group and give feedback to writers whose feedback style you enjoy to build connections)

Of course, sharing parts of your novel in progress with other writers or trusted readers is helpful as it will motivate you and provide valuable feedback. But writing terrible first drafts is normal and early critique providers should keep this in mind.

King describes the moment he learned this valuable lesson about the writing process in his writing guide On Writing: 

Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.

Stephen King, On Writing: A memoir of the craft (2000), p. 57.

Make a checklist for the next stage of process

The purpose of a first draft, ultimately, is to get a version of your story written.

Even if it’s a version that falls woefully short (in your eyes) of the ideal mental image you had when you started. This is a common feeling at the end of a first pass at creating. Yet it’s why rewriting (and working with editors) are valuable parts of the writing process.

Writer Matt Hughes puts it thus:

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them ‘just right.’ But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it’s to get it written — so that you’ll have something to work with.

Matt Hughes, quoted by Publication Coach Daphne Gray-Grant here.

After writing your first draft, think about making a checklist to guide your next. Think about what makes a good story. Your checklist may include questions such as:

• Does each chapter contribute to establishing characters’ goals, motivations and conflicts?
• Is the writing clear and the language suited to my target audience’s age group or language faculty?
• Is there a balance between my narrator’s interiority or inner monologue and outward action/event?

Let your own questions and inner editor’s voice (and crit circle, editor or beta readers if you’re at this stage of revision and editing) guide your checklist.

What is your drafting process like? Share it with us in the comments.

Learn more about how Now Novel helps you develop your draft with writing tools, critique circles and more.