My Secret to Finishing a First Draft.
You're not going to like it, but hear me out...
For three years I couldn’t finish a thing.
My hard drive is like a graveyard, littered with half finished novels from that time. WIPs I plan to go back to, but when I do I will likely need to restart.
The fact is: the longer I take to draft, the more the story shifts under me. What I thought was the emotional core becomes a side plot. A character I once loved stops making sense. I second-guess the structure, the tone, and eventually the entire premise.
I tried to tackle the problem. I experimented with different genres, changed up my routine, even tried productivity courses and journals, but nothing worked.
Finally, I looked back to the last draft I had finished. It had been during NaNoWriMo. I finished it on 50k words. It had been messy and underwritten, but it had an end. A real, usable ending. And more importantly: I’d gone on to revise that novel four more times. I’d turned it into something I was proud of.
I thought about the story I had finished before that. How I had set myself a goal to finish it in just two months and had succeeded.
Around the same time I was rereading On Writing by Stephen where he says the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months. It stuck with me because I realised that was what I had been doing, I just hadn’t realised it was a thing.
I now call it it Fast Drafting. Others might call it Heart Drafting or Zero Drafting, though these don’t accurately imply that speed is a critical factor of this way of writing.
I decided to try it with my next WIP. I gave myself two months to finish it. I also gave myself permission for it to be horribly messy, terribly written and around half the word count it should be, because I knew that was the only way; fast drafting and readable, well written stories do not go hand in hand.
Making peace with this was the hardest part, but once I did, I found myself enjoying the process, building momentum and getting into the story and… low and behold, I finished the draft in around 9 weeks.
And I know what you’re thinking, you might have finished it, but how good could the writing be if you wrote it that quickly? Surely you will have to rewrite it all again?
As I typed The End, I would have agreed with you. But a few months after, when I went back and did a read through, I was pleasantly surprised. It needs work, there’s no doubt about that, it’s too short for one (it needs a heap of description and world building added in), and it’s messy and chaotic, but it’s also cohesive and consistent and feels like the same story throughout.
King put it well when he said that if he takes too long to write a story it begins to take on an odd foreign feel. I felt that in my bones with my previous stories, frankenstories hat had been written over months peppered with breaks while my life, the seasons and my mood had been shifting to and fro. These shifts and stops and starts managed to work their way within the chapters, giving my stories a fragmented feel.
My fast drafts did not have that.
So for today’s post, I thought I would put together some thoughts on why I love Fast Drafting so much and if it could work for you.
Fast Drafting is all about Momentum
Don’t try to write something perfect. Don’t even try to write something good.
Fast drafting is about getting through it. It shouldn’t feel like a slog all the time (though sometimes it will) but it should feel like throwing all the ingredients in a bowl to make a cake. It will look pretty messy, but will eventually come out great.
The thing with momentum is there has to be a reachable finish line. This is why my fast drafts are so short. They’re underwritten, sparse on description, light on transitions. I leave notes to myself in square brackets: [insert argument here], [needs weather], [check this character’s name?]. But I get to the end.
To work out what is feasible for you, first figure out what is a doable word count each day. For me it is 500-1000 words. Then work out what that would be over a 12 week period. So 500 x 90 is 45,000 words. There we go, I have my rough fast draft word count and a rough fast draft daily goal.
And that’s the magic of fast drafting. You set out a daily habit that you only need to sustain for a few months. When you sit down to write every day, the story is still warm in your hands. You remember what happened yesterday. You know what needs to happen today. You’re not asking yourself to write a novel, you’re just writing the next scene.
That daily movement forward, however small, is the engine. It builds discipline. One that, while I may not be able to sustainably keep up indefinitely, I can implement for eight to ten weeks in order to see my story come to life. And that is enough.
Fast Drafting is Finite
Thats brings me to another reason I love fast drafting. It is finite.
Telling myself I’ll finish a draft in around eight weeks is far more manageable than saying I’m writing a novel for the next year or an indefinite amount of time. Even though the novel will likely take a year (or even two) by the time it’s polished, revised, rewritten, and edited, I find it psychologically helpful to treat the first draft as a self-contained sprint (and you all know how much I love writing sprints).
Having an end in sight matters. If I know that by mid-July or the end of August I’ll have a full draft, I’m more likely to stay motivated.
It’s not about speed for the sake of speed. It’s about the kind of creative tunnel vision that comes when you give yourself permission to go all in. I love the intensity of it. The slightly obsessive nature of it (it’s why NaNo did so well for so long). I also love the sense of being immersed so totally and completely in the story.
That brings me onto my final reason why I love fast drafting.
Fast Drafting Creates a Cohesive story
There is nothing I find more frustrating than a story morphing while I’m writing it. Before drafting it, fine. That is the percolation stage that is essential to my process. Between drafts, also fine. Each draft is a chance for the story to change and transform as a whole. But for the story to start as one thing, then become something else in the middle, the something else as it ends. I’m sure it is something we are all familiar with, but it provides a real challenge when it comes time to revise. Usually I end up completely re-writing it.
However, when I move quickly, I find I can capture the story while it’s still fresh. It stays relatively cohesive. Even if I discover new things along the way (and I always do) the draft as a whole feels like one creative breath, not a patchwork quilt.
Fast drafting isn’t for everyone. Some writers thrive on slow, deliberate progress. If that’s your method and it works for you, keep going. But if you find yourself stalling halfway through a novel, if you abandon projects after 20k words, if you struggle with perfectionism or over-editing while drafting, then fast drafting might be worth a try.
And the secret to fast drafting is this:
You have to give yourself permission to write badly
Set a short, focused time frame.
Track your progress, not your quality.
And most importantly, keep going.
Because in the end, the only way to finish a book… is to finish the damn book.
Let me know if you’ve ever tried fast drafting, or if you’re tempted to? I’d love to hear how it worked for you ⤵️
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This really resonates with me. When I wrote the first draft of my novel two years ago, I basically wrote it in three months. It needs a second pass to strengthen the plot, but it exists. Then life circumstances took me away from it for a couple of years, which is probably exactly what I needed to be able to come back to it with fresh eyes. Though word count is a good goal, for me it is drafting a scene a day. I’m using the 24-chapter outline as a roadmap, and I’ll write as many scenes as each “chapter” needs until I feel like the plot is stronger. Fingers crossed I can finish it by mid July.
For the first time I'm trying to write my first draft without going back 100 times to edit, and I've gotten farther than I ever have, but I think I'm still getting stuck on making things look perfect and I end up stalling for weeks and months... Which doesn't help. Definitely going to implement some of these tips immediately and see how they improve the process.