Letter to Myself as I Write the First Draft

If you're writing a first draft, this is for you, too.

Photo by Luke Lung on Unsplash

Dear me (and anyone else writing a first draft right now),

I know you’re struggling with this story. Right now, it feels heavy and depressing when it’s supposed to be an escape. You keep asking yourself why you’re writing something so dark when what you crave is light. You tell yourself no one will want to read it, that you don’t even want to write it.

But this is just the first draft. You’re not here to make it perfect. You’re here to tell yourself the story. And you’re not done yet.

You’ve been away from this story for a bit, and that’s okay. But remember what happens when you skip too many days—you lose momentum, forget where you left off, and suddenly the negative thoughts feel louder than the story itself. That doesn’t mean the story’s broken. It just means you need to get back to your daily practice so you can continue where you left off instead of trying to remember what you wrote.

As you well know, you can’t expect to run a marathon on your first day back on the track.

Right now, everything feels jagged. But that’s what first drafts are supposed to be. It’s kind of like unearthing a dinosaur bone covered in moss and mud and gunk. At first it looks like nothing special. But if you stay patient and keep brushing away the dirt, something precious and interesting starts to take shape.

This story could be precious and interesting. But you have to give it a chance.

So write the bones. Let it be messy, raw, and full of half-formed thoughts and droning exposition. Leave the notes in parentheses where they are. Leave the parts that don’t make sense yet. This isn’t the version anyone else will see. This is the excavation, the groundwork…the beginning.

This is Draft Zero—the one that teaches you what the story wants to be.

There’s no deadline. You’re allowed to move slowly. You’re allowed to rediscover your rhythm. Just keep digging. Keep showing up to the page.

You can brush off the dirt later.

With love,
Your future self with a finished novel

P.S. I’m not doing any variation of National Novel Writing Month this month, as I’m in a low-pressure season. But I am getting back to my novel, which does have an element of pressure (especially since I’m in the sticky middle of it), just without a deadline. I know a lot of you are writing a novel for NaNoWriMo (or just writing, like me). For those of you in the thick of it, I raise my hand in solidarity. Keep going, we got this!