Top 10 Tips for Writing a First Draft

For some authors, it’s their favourite part of the writing process, for others, they’d rather stick pins in their eyes and hibernate in a cryogenic pod until it’s miraculously complete. But no matter what side you fall on, the one thing they all agree on is that you need a first draft before you can start doing anything with it. I’m a big fan of the “vomit” approach: writing and writing no matter how crap the words might be. Writing when you don’t want to. Writing when you’re uninspired. Writing when the muse strikes and writing when she’s AWOL. Writing when you feel like every single word is trash and no one will ever want to read this and you are a fraud and everything you write is utter garbage. Like with everything in the writing world, there’s no one right way to do it, but here are my top 10 tips for getting those words down in the first place:

1.     Think of your first line long before you start to write. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it helps to know what the first line is going to be. You can always change it later. For me, I can’t start until I’ve got a first line. It doesn’t matter if it’s crap, it doesn’t matter if it changes (because inevitably it will) but for me it’s essential to know clearly what that first line’s going to be.

2.     Don’t plot if you’re not a plotter. Don’t try and “pants” if you’re not a pantser. Don’t listen to the kind of writing advice that tells you there’s only one way to write a book (so by all means, don’t listen to my advice)

3.     But if you’re stuck…try to plot if you’re a pantser, and try to pants if you’re a plotter! Just for a bit…until you’re unstuck!

4.     Walk. Or run. Or do whatever activity you’re able to that involves getting the endorphins pumping.  Even if it’s raining. This is how I’ve come up with every first line for every first draft of a novel and all those “aha!” moments that solve plot problems.

5.     Give yourself little goals. ‘If I write 300 words I can make another coffee”, “If I finish this chapter I can go for a walk”, “If I figure out that plot point I can buy that book that I’m definitely going to read and not just add to the teetering TBR pile that’s currently an OHS violation in my bedroom.”

6.     If your goal is 1000 words a day or 2000 or 500, break it up into chunks. For the last manuscript I wrote I tried what Sally Hepworth calls this the “nifty 350” – writing 350 words at a time, 5 times a day, makes the huge task of 1000 or 2000 seem manageable. Trick your brain. Disclosure: I didn’t do this everyday. Working full time means I have to sometimes push the writing right until the end of the day and often did not meet a word count of 1000, but was more like 500. On days when I had more time, like a weekend or when someone else was looking after my son, I was able to do more.

7.     Read, watch a movie, exercise – do other things besides writing and staring at the blank page. But always come back to the writing.

8.     You don’t have to write every day, but think about your novel every day. On the commute to work, when you’re doing the dishes, when your colleague is bragging about their Europe trip, when you’re trying to work out if the toddler is actually asleep so you can sneak out of the room.

9.     Take it seriously. Tell people what you’re doing. They’re not going to laugh at you. And if they do, plot how you’re going to remind them that they did when the book’s published. This helps keep you accountable and helps you take yourself seriously. Also, if you’re writing crime, people who are not supportive of your writing make excellent murder victims. Fictional ones, of course.

10.  Don’t take it seriously. The novel I took the least seriously and just wrote because I wanted to write it and because it was a story that I wanted to tell regardless of whether or not it would end up published was the manuscript that got me an offer of representation from an agent. I still took the draft seriously and I wrote mostly every day but it was the first time I thought “f*** it, I’m just going to write this weird thing that I don’t know if anyone would actually want, but I really want to read something like this.” It took me 5 manuscripts to work that out – it might take you less or more, but there is no one right way to do this – trust yourself, trust the process. You got this.