First drafts are always bad. Right? Well, maybe, maybe not. This oft-repeated bit of writing wisdom gets very mixed responses, including people being offended that aspersions are being cast on their hard work, people feeling discouraged at the prospect of putting a lot of time and effort into something destined to be crap, and people who treat it as license to throw caution to the wind—because the first draft basically doesn’t even count.

The thing is, it’s not quite as simple as all first drafts = bad. Let’s take a look at why it’s a little more complicated than that.

How do you define a ‘first draft’?

This might seem obvious enough, but people take dramatically different approaches to a first draft, and their results can be correspondingly diverse. For some people, the first draft is just getting words onto paper (or screen) in a roughly coherent order, until they have a beginning, middle and end. Others prefer to back-track and revise as they go, tweaking earlier sections to fit in with ideas that might come up later or simply to improve what’s already there. Both of those writers might come out with a first complete draft, but chances are one of those is going to look a lot closer to finished than the other. That’s not even touching other differences in approach (such as in planning, or external feedback along the way) that can have a significant impact on how well a first draft hangs together.

Bearing all this in mind, it seems clear that any sweeping statement about the quality of first drafts has to be fairly meaningless. But while we’re on the topic of statements of quality…

What is ‘bad’ anyway?

To completely misapply the Tolstoy quote: All good books are alike, each bad book is bad in its own way. When someone says a first draft is ‘bad’, they can mean all manner of things. Is the pacing off? The characterisation inconsistent? The writing overblown or too bare? The timeline confusing? The plot boring, or over-stuffed? The dialogue stilted? The fact is, some of these probably will apply to your first draft, but not all of them. There’ll be aspects of your first draft that are bad, and aspects that are great, and most of it will probably land somewhere between those two unhelpfully-vague extremes until you’ve had a chance to really dig into your manuscript and polish up all of those various components. So, if we don’t have a universal definition of either a first draft, or what it means for one to be bad…

What can we usefully take from this?

The assurance that “Your first draft is always going to be rubbish” probably isn’t going anywhere, because, although we’ve established that it’s pretty meaningless as a quality judgement on a writer’s early efforts, it does serve an important purpose.

It’s easy to have a great idea, and it can be fun to start trying to turn that idea into a story, but the process of moving an idea from your brain to the physical world is typically a challenging one. Plot points that seemed great when they were just floating around in your imagination suddenly come across as clunky or contrived when you try to put them into words. Characters you were having conversations with in your head seem dull and lifeless on the page. It’s frustrating, and often disheartening, and that’s where this idea comes in.

“Don’t worry if it’s not coming out right, all first drafts suck.”

It’s a way to reassure newer writers that what they’re going through is normal, and a way for more experienced writers to remind themselves that pretty much every story concept struggles on first contact with the real world.

I think it can also be useful as a gentle reminder to people who’ve finished their first draft that, no matter how much they might want to be done with it, it’s not likely to be ready for publication (whether self-publishing or submitting somewhere) in its current state. A first draft may not be bad, but ‘not bad’ is not the same thing as ‘polished’.

What are your first drafts like?

Are they usually chaotic, or do you tend to edit as you go? Share your experience in the comments, and let me know whether you agree or disagree with my interpretation of the widely accepted wisdom that all first drafts are rubbish!