The following is a guest blog post by the winner of the 82nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, Dan J. Fiore. Dan shares his thoughts on the first draft writing process, common first draft problems and why your story should always take precedent over these problems.
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First drafts. They’re tough, right? I mean, first drafts of anything. Even the first draft of this blog post. Typing out those first two words alone: exhausting. So let’s try to make things a little easier on ourselves…
I probably don’t need to tell you that finishing a story is a constant struggle from ideation to publication (or sometimes—okay, most of the time—to rejection). It’s a journey walked in bare feet uphill with no street signs as strangers scream conflicting directions at you from the sidewalks.
I’ll start by stating one thing that applies to everything I talk about below: your first draft is all about story. It’s about discovering the details, characters, scenes and arc of your narrative. Everything else can wait until the second draft.
And, to be honest, the following bits and pieces of the process—these struggles and worries that are just you wasting time—they’re things that I’m still fighting with too. In a way, this blog post is as much a letter to myself, saying, “Stop wasting valuable time with all these silly things,” as it is a list of lessons that I’ve learned the hard way and yet still run into time and again.
So let’s do this together. Let’s promise each other we won’t waste any more time fretting over the following fruitless aspects of our first drafts.