People will always tell you that in writing, your first draft is bad, no matter what. That’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. Nothing will change it, and nothing you do will change it.

I’m here to tell you that they’re absolutely right.

The first draft of any creative piece of writing will not be your best work, and it doesn’t have to be. I feel like that’s the important thing about this – you should not be aiming to create your masterpiece through a single draft. Now, this might seem discouraging at first – you’ve just poured your heart and soul into writing a beautiful story, after all, and I’ve just told you that it’s bad. You need to remember, though, that there’s always opportunities to go back and make it something you love even more, as well as make it better for any would-be readers.

Getting to the point of accepting that your first draft will be bad takes a while. Instead of aiming to make your first draft a masterpiece, just aim to create your ideas and get them onto paper in whatever way you want to – don’t worry about potentially being inconsistent, or accidentally creating plotholes, or anything like that. Your ideas will be erratic and unfocussed, but they’re there. They create the beginnings of a good story, and lay the groundwork for the masterpiece that’s to be made.

The second draft is where you start to fix up inconsistencies in your writing, going over your text and fixing things that don’t make sense, expanding on things that aren’t explained well, and removing things that don’t add to the story. Then, after that, you can do as many drafts as you’d like before your product is completed. While writing my first draft, I sometimes go back and re-read parts of the story for various reasons, and every time I do, I find something I’ve written that I dislike. At first, it discouraged me, because what I wrote wasn’t quite as good as I thought it was when I wrote it. I learned, however, to just go with it and accept that this is just what’s going to happen for a while until I start editing.

Even my blog posts go through a few different drafts before I’m happy with them.

I suppose this is just a long way of saying that you need to be okay with making mistakes. So go out and just write, without worrying about if it’s good or not, because you can always make it better.