Things NOT To Worry About During Your First Draft

Pressured writing does not make for good writing nor does it help your creative mind work in its best shape.

There are too many other things you have to be worrying about on a day to day, and worrying about your writing while your writing should not be one of them.

Your first draft is your creative child, you’re building them limb by limb, just worry about putting the pieces together. You’ll still have a child in the end even if the hand is where the foot should go.

Not my best analogy I know.

If you’re stressing about any of the things below while you’re working on your first draft.

Stop.

Quality

Your first draft is going to suck and that’s perfectly ok. If you were able to write a perfect book with only your first draft then I would be envious and also quite scared of your potential.

Your first draft is going to be full of problems

• Too many characters
• Pointless dialogue
• Telling where you should be showing
• Dialogue tags
• Too many adverbs
• Formatting

It’s all ok, that is what editing is for. Your first draft should be about nothing but getting the words down in any way you can. Your first draft could technically be just a whole notebook full of ideas about your book without there being a single complete sentence.

The first draft is a trash draft, you have to just dump everything you have into it and later on go sifting through it for the important bits.

Descriptions

You don’t have to have the perfect setting or even the major descriptions of your characters ready to go in the beginning. When I was recently writing my work in progress I knew my characters were going to be in a castle.

But I didn’t know what it looked like so in the places where I should have been describing the room they just walked into I wrote…

[INSERT CASTLE DESCRIPTION HERE]

When I’m ready to do more research and make sure the castle I’m describing is appropriate for the time period in which my story is set in I’ll simply search for the brackets and fill in the spots that I left out the first time around.

Theme

The themes in your novel are going to be important, but not important enough that you have to stress out about them when writing your first draft.

Some of your themes are going to naturally as the story progresses and others you can touch up when you’ve finished your first draft. You don’t want to try and force them as you are writing, this will make them appear to be insincere and forced upon your reader.

Think of what type of themes you want to include in your story before writing and keep it in the back of your mind

Readership

When you write you should know who your audience is going to be, but you shouldn’t be thinking about whether they are going to like your book as you are writing it.

Thinking your book isn’t going to be good enough and that nobody will read it is not going to help you write it.

Your first draft is not the time to be worrying about this. You should honestly never worry about this. The first and only person you should be writing for is yourself. If the story you’re writing has some tropes and themes in it that only you would like, write it anyway.

Your book could be the exact book someone out there is looking to read they’re just waiting on you to write it first.

---

You have enough on your plate to stress about when you make the life-changing decision to write your novel. Believe me, the sleepless nights become more frequent after that first draft is written so don’t stress about it now and get those much-needed z’s.

Your book is inside you waiting to be written. Don’t let anything hold you back, especially not yourself.

With love,

B.K. xo

---

If you've liked what you read you can show your support by subscribing, pledging your support, or leaving me a tip that directly supports and aids me as a writer.

By joining Vocal+ you can earn more per read on every story you publish on Vocal.

Click my link to start your 7-day free trial today and start earning more for your stories.

_____________________________________________

This story was originally posted on Medium.

If you would like to experience Medium yourself, consider supporting me and thousands of other writers by signing up for a membership. It only costs $5 per month, it supports us writers, greatly, and you have the chance to make money with your own writing as well. By signing up with this link, you'll support me directly with a portion of your fee, it won't cost you more. If you do so, thank you a million times!

If you love what you've read you can also show your support by buying me a cup of coffee to fuel my writing. 

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/barbaraking