Example of writing a rough draft how to#

The rough draft is that wet lump of clay. You need a wet lump of clay to work with. You can’t sit in front of a potter’s wheel and turn air into a vase. Don’t let anything get in the way of that goal. The most important thing in all of the writing process is to get an entire story down on paper. But that process is impossible if the rough draft doesn’t exist in the first place.

Example of writing a rough draft how to#

The entire next entry in this series will be about how to revise rough drafts and make them better. I’m going to repeat this, and I strongly suggest that you make it your daily rough draft mantra: Nothing stifles creativity and production like the inner critic who shows up too early. If you take only one insight away from this part of this series, please let it be this one. Insight #11: Your Rough Draft Doesn’t Have to be Good We’ll pick up the numbering right where we left off. I hope to help you through this process as much as I can. The idea for the story is exciting, and the first chapter leaps right from the fingertips, but things quickly bog down. I know many other writers also struggle with their rough drafts.

Revising and publishing are the fun and easy parts.

To me, the rough draft is the most difficult part of the writing process. I’m sharing these simply because I think my twenty years of fruitless endeavors might’ve been a whole lot easier if I’d known a few things before I got started. Those insights might not be equally useful to all people, and that same warning applies here as we dive into the writing process. In the first part of this series, I listed some of the insights I wish I’d known before I set out to become a writer.