Strategies for Producing a First Draft

Everyone knows that you have to have a first draft before you can have a final draft, but sometimes producing the first draft can be an excruciating experience—so much so that sometimes the first draft never emerges. What can you do to make producing the first draft easier?

In her hilarious and insightful book Bird by Bird, the wise Anne Lamott offers two pieces of advice: 

1) Give yourself short assignments

2) Give yourself permission to write what she calls “really, really shitty first drafts.” 

These are priceless suggestions that I modify only slightly by changing the order and lowering the bar still further: I suggest giving yourself permission to write shitty first drafts of very short assignments. And don’t force yourself to start at what you think will be the beginning of your piece. 

If you are writing nonfiction, then a very short assignment might be to analyze a single source. Three or four sentences later, you have a paragraph—and, more importantly, momentum to keep going. If you are writing fiction, you might try to write a single moment that will snowball into a scene. Before you know it, you will have hit your daily writing target—something many writers, including me, find helpful. In his On Writing, Stephen King suggests aiming for a thousand words a day. I’ve found that to be a good, sustainable target when working on a longer article or book. For me, the satisfaction of hitting the target is no less in the third month of working on a project than in the earliest days. 

Now, you can give yourself permission to write shitty first drafts of very short assignments and you can set and hit a daily writing target—but that still might not be enough to get you to a full first draft. In my experience, nothing lights a fire underneath you like having a weekly deadline and someone (or a group) holding you accountable to meet it. In a New Yorker profile by Hilton Als, Toni Morrison recalls participating in a weekly writing group when she was first starting out in which “The only rule was that you had to bring something to read every week." I love the forcing function that participating in a weekly writing group provides. The weekly feedback and—if you pick the right people—encouragement is just as valuable. And if you are sharing pieces of a developing whole, you’ll have readers invested in your finishing. 

None of these strategies work optimally unless you eliminate every barrier to getting words and ideas out of your brain and onto paper (or the screen). The strategies here fall into two categories: eliminating distractions and ensuring you have the ability to capture thoughts whenever and wherever they emerge. 

There are physical and mental components to distraction. The physical ones often can be solved rather easily—a quiet room, a closed door. The mental distractions become more vexing with each passing month. To clear mental space, I do not check email or the news or anything else before beginning to write, turn off all notifications on my work computer, silence my phone and leave it in a different room, and use firewall rules to add friction to my ability to use the internet for anything other than work-related research. This might sound extreme, or impossible. But even the most overextended writer I know—three kids, demanding job with long hours, parents to care for, and more—can do it, albeit in the small hours of the morning. It is a privilege to be able to clear mental space, but we often have more agency and ability to do it than we realize. 

To capture thoughts whenever or wherever they emerge, I keep an iPad with a keyboard case in the kitchen, a steno book and pen next to my bed, a small white board in the shower, and I sometimes even dictate into my phone like a lunatic when I am out on bike rides (only on closed roads or trails). Basically, if a semi-coherent thought enters my brain, I try to get it down as quickly as possible. Don’t take for granted that thoughts will reappear at a more opportune moment.

I am sure there are people who don’t need any of these strategies to produce a first draft in a timely manner. But for the rest of us, or at least for me, these strategies are essential.