I’m in the middle of writing a novel and discovered that writing is hard. You know what’s easier? Dispensing advice.
With that in mind, I’d like to advise all writers that: your first draft is for your eyes only.
A beautifully crafted story won’t emerge the first time you sit down to write it, regardless of how well developed it is in your mind. Writing is an art form and like all art, the learning stages can be unsightly.
So let your first draft be a mess.
Go wild with this one. Use purple prose if you want, toss in all the adverbs, tell instead of show, choke the paragraphs with every cliche known to writers, use run-on sentences or fragments of phrases, but write it.
Write incoherently, write fervently, write with unfettered joy, write with abandon. Get the story out of your mind and into a format that can be edited. Write the story as if you’re telling someone the best parts, write it out of order, write the easiest bits, write the same parts over and over, but write it.
Ramble on for pages and pages about the character’s backstory, describe the setting as if it’s your favourite place to be in the whole universe, create epic infodumps, but write it.
There’s no need to edit or censor yourself. Rewording and reworking can happen later. This…
