Writing Goals: 2025 [Part 8] — First Draft

10 part series for writers to consider what we did in 2024 and will do in 2025.

We pick up with our year-end attempt to help Go Into The Story readers set and achieve their writing goals for 2025. To revisit the process of self-reflection from last week, here are the links:

Day 1: Looking Back

Day 2: Assessing Where You Are

Day 3: Where Do You Want To Go As A Writer?

Day 4: Practical Matters

Part 5: Going Public

This week we shift the focus to a more pragmatic part of the discussion, considering a variety of tips about how to manage time and projects more efficiently. Here is what we have thus far:

Part 6: Schedule

Part 7: Time Management

Today: First Draft

This is short, but sweet. When you write a first draft, there is only one thing that matters:

GET THE DAMN THING DONE!!!

More script projects crash and burn because somewhere along the line after typing FADE IN, writers get frazzled and frustrated, disgusted and depressed, peeved and pessimistic, and simply stop writing and never finish the first draft.

If you start a script…

And you’re just not feeling it…

The plot is a major struggle…

The characters seem off…

The dialogue isn’t flowing…

The whole script conjures up the odor of zoo dust…

It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. The only thing that does is to finish the first draft! Just get the damn thing done!

I guarantee you no matter how awful you think it is, the actual process of getting to the end of the first draft will do the following:

• Help you understand your story better.
• Surface story problems enabling you to address them.
• Put you that much closer to finishing the script.
• Get you past a huge psychological obstacle of finishing the first draft.

Perhaps the most important thing: After you finish a first draft, you are no longer writing, you are rewriting. You are editing. There’s not a writer I know about or have interviewed who doesn’t prefer editing to writing.

So if there is one writing mantra above all others I implore you to take to heart in 2024, it’s this one. No matter how hard it is for you to drag what you think may be a wretched assemblage of stinking scenes and putrid pages across the finish line known as FADE OUT… do it!

Everything looks different once you have a first draft in hand.

Everything is different once you have a first draft in hand.

Just get the damn thing done!

By the way, cracking the story before typing FADE IN is often directly connected to the writer finishing a first draft or not. If you know the story before you commence the page-writing part of the process, you exponentially increase the chances of you getting the damn thing [first draft] done. If not, you reduce the odds in your favor. Moreover, by doing the hard work of figuring out the story in prep, there’s an awfully good chance you will turn a future Rewrite [R] into a rewrite [r], and speed your way into the editing process.

Tomorrow: The only way out is through.