Your first draft will be messy, and that’s perfectly okay

In fact, that’s exactly its job.

I was talking to a newer writer this week, and I mentioned that I was struggling through edits with my third draft. I said that I knew that the first draft was supposed to be messy, but I had to keep reminding myself that it was okay if the second and third and fourth drafts were also messy.

Her response? “The first draft is supposed to be messy?!”

I shared this story on social media, and other writers confirmed that they also didn’t realize the first draft would be messy. This is what can stop writers from finishing books that change the world, and it’s important we talk about it.

Your first draft will be messy—shitty, even.

You’re creating something from nothing, pulling words out of your brain and putting them onto the page.

Even with a detailed outline and lengthy character sheets, it’s still going to be messy. It’s impossible to craft perfect sentences on the first go-around, because you don’t even fully know the story you’re trying to tell in that first draft.

The point of the first draft is to get the story out of your head and onto the page—that’s it. It won’t be pretty, and it’ll need lots of revision—and that’s perfectly fine.

In fact, it’s a disservice to your writing to try to make the first draft “perfect.” You’ll waste hours trying to come up with the perfect sentence to convey the intensity of your protagonist’s inner wound, and then you’ll get to the next chapter and realize that their wound is actually totally different. Or the person you thought was the protagonist is really a side character!

Those “perfect” words you wrote in the last chapter? In the trash now. And that assumes you even make it past that first chapter and don’t get stuck in the endless cycle of editing over and over.

I did NaNoWriMo for the first time in high school and again throughout college, and while the organization itself has its faults (to say the least), I’m grateful for that experience because writing 50k words in 30 days taught me how to write an extremely messy first draft. I didn’t have time to slow down and perfect each sentence—I needed to get my 1667 words written each day, or else I’d fall behind.

My writing pace is much slower these days, but the principle is the same—I write my first drafts as quickly as I can because I know that I can’t understand the full scope of the story until that draft is out of my head and on the page. I can’t figure out what’s missing until I see what’s there, and I can’t determine which characters need more depth until I try out different things in the manuscript.

If I kept expecting my first draft to be perfect, or even coherent, I’d never finish novels.

If you hope to finish the novel of your dreams, you have to be willing to write messily.

How do you work past the need for perfection when writing a first draft? Where do you most often get stuck?