by Jenna Kalinsky.
We think all day long, and you would imagine that to write well and come up with great ideas for your first draft, you’d want to think more, harder, and better.
Yet it’s actually the opposite.
Thinking while generating your first draft can hold your work back. The secret to writing a great first draft is then, paradoxically, to think less.
Find out why you don’t want to think while writing your first draft and the benefits behind thoughtlessness; identify the drawbacks from thinking too early in the process; and learn a few quick strategies to help you if you get stuck.
The goal? To keep your cool while yielding the freshest, riskiest, and ultimately most publishable material.
In this article, we’ll look at:
Writing an innovative, publishable manuscript happens over a series of (many, many) steps. The first—writing a great first draft—is the gawkiest one, and for many writers, it’s a true challenge, both logistically and emotionally.
Your first draft is likely to be a mess because, as Michael Cunningham describes it, it’s a “translation”: the process of turning the garbled noise in your head into physical words. Changing mediums—from thought to language—is invariably going to be choppy, to say the least.
Very few writers in the history of ever have managed to jump the queue and write glowing, articulate first drafts. Christopher Hitchens and John O’Hara are two examples from this tiny group.
Hitchens, who wrote and published almost entirely without touching the backspace key was, one could argue, not normal. O’Hara would also apparently roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter and write straight through without revising.
For the rest of us whose backspace key is so loved it says “akspe,” we must humbly recognize that to arrive at a publishable manuscript, we have to start at the beginning: with a mess of words tumbling over each other in a terrible first draft.
Then, over a series of subsequent drafts, we refine, tighten, clarify, and shape those words until our stories and ideas shine.
Just as we cannot argue with the tides or the seasons, we cannot argue with the fact that not only will our first draft typically be a bit wooly and wild, we should lean into it and want it to be.
A healthy first draft is one that is allowed to “become” without being overly controlled. In giving your unconscious mind permission to do its thing, the most energetic, engaging material is what will make it onto the page.
When you stop worrying about how your first draft is performing, you give yourself permission to discover what you actually have to say. You also begin to develop a stronger relationship with writing as a process, which builds a healthier and more enthusiastic writing practice.
And, since you are only human, if—or when—your thinking mind takes over, having a few strategies on hand to help you stop thinking is good practice, too.
A good way to stop thinking about your writing is to stop acting like an invested human who pores over every word and has opinions about it.
Instead, become a machine of words. A typist. Someone who leans back and lets their hands move in service of the physical act of writing.
When you stop scrutinizing every thought as it arrives, you give your unconscious mind the reins. Left unchecked, it can roam freely, diving into nooks and crannies it normally doesn’t visit, making connections and giving rise to ideas you might otherwise reject before they even reach the page.
It can be scary to be that truthful, but it’s also thrilling.
You don’t have to use everything that comes out of you. You don’t even have to like everything that comes out of you. But giving those thoughts life in black and white is what can set your work apart from the safe, pat, controlled material that so many other writers produce.
The more freedom you give yourself, the more likely you are to stumble upon something genuinely surprising.
Not thinking while writing your first draft doesn’t just help you generate better material. It can also transform the experience of writing itself.
By giving yourself permission to let loose, you’re freeing yourself from judgment—both your own and everyone else’s.
Once you decide to trust the process and simply do as Natalie Goldberg advises in Writing Down the Bones and “keep your hands moving,” you’re far more likely to enter a state known as “flow.”
Coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a deeply focused state in which you’re completely immersed in what you’re doing. You’re in the zone, generating ideas, insights, and physical output almost as if you’re flying on your own momentum.
This state comes about when we give ourselves permission to surrender to the purity of simply being.
One could argue that shutting off your thinking and tuning out the external and internal noise—the stuff that trips us up—is a form of meditation or flow. Not thinking is then a double gift: you’re freed from the running babble of your interior critic and the expectations of others, while simultaneously positioning yourself for greater creative output.
Even if that “higher power” is simply yourself.
When you’re fully engaged, you’re at your best as a creative. Writing without overthinking can make you feel more fulfilled, present, and satisfied—all excellent reasons to want to keep writing, and to keep writing well.
When you step in too early and try to make your first draft behave like a fourth or fifth draft, you’re cutting your ideas off at the knees.
Creative ideas need room and time to find themselves and bloom into what they’re meant to become. Controlling them from the outset invariably makes them thinner, safer, and far less specific or interesting.
Your reader will feel they’re in predictable territory because they will be.
You simply won’t have had enough time to get to know your characters, understand the full breadth of your situation, or discover the real story you want to unpack and share.
Protecting your work against failure—or against the possibility of being a mess—forces you to bring it into the realm of the already known.
And the already known is rarely where your most interesting work lives.
Most people spend their lives training themselves to look competent and capable. After all, that’s what gets you jobs, partners, and bank loans. Everyone loves a winner!
But to write a great first draft, you have to undo all those years of practice and force yourself to let it all hang out, knowing that what emerges from you will probably be a wreck.
Being confronted with that vulnerability isn’t just hard. For some writers, it actually hurts.
Our unconscious minds are more likely to take risks and make unexpected connections when we don’t feel scrutinized. But the moment we start thinking critically about what we’re doing, judgment invariably creeps in.
It’s irrational to hold a first draft to the standard you’d hold a published work—one that has been through 20 or 30 rounds of revision and several professional editors—but that doesn’t stop the interior monologue of self-flagellation:
This sucks.
I can’t do this.
Why did I think I could write?
I’ll never get published.
These thoughts can easily snowball into performance anxiety, self-doubt, impostor syndrome, and, eventually, writer’s block.
And these feelings don’t just harm the writing. They harm the writer. Left unchecked, they can cause you to become blocked, afraid to continue.
No innovator, artist, or thinker ever did anything that moved the social needle without taking risks and pushing beyond their comfort zone.
Writing is not for the weak-hearted on the best of days. Writing a first draft is exponentially more vulnerable.
The best way to keep yourself moving forward is to embrace the process, warts and all.
Books are written by people willing to break through boundaries to say something valuable.
Intellectually, you already know that trying to control your first draft will yield a dry, thin product—one that lacks the depth, insight, and humanity that can only come from allowing yourself the grace of freedom.
Accessing your innermost thoughts and feelings, allowing your mind to tread into uncomfortable areas, or rambling into something you want to understand more deeply: that’s the real deal.
That’s the material that can put you on the map.
That’s the genuine core of what you want to say.
Leap and your net will appear.
Or, for a writer: go for it, don’t think during your first draft, and trust that you’ll have much richer material to turn into something amazing.
Turning off your thinking while writing a great first draft is far easier said than done.
Researchers have noted that the average person has approximately 6,200 fully realized thoughts every day. Many of those thoughts involve how we’re coming across, whether we’re “performing” at our peak, and what others think of us. The expectations, judgments, and striving are continuous.
Recognizing the benefits of not thinking in order to write a great first draft doesn’t make doing it any less difficult.
On the days when it’s too difficult to turn down the volume on your thinking mind and allow your hands to fly, here are three strategies you can use.
These strategies are both a jumpstart and a distraction that will free you up to have some fun “off-project.” Done well, you will take the pressure off of yourself, generate some fun material, and keep up not the subject matter but the momentum when you return to the work at hand.
[Read how each of these strategies works here.]
Even if you use one of these strategies for just ten minutes, you’re likely to revitalize both your approach to writing and the writing itself.
Start small. Work your way up to longer stretches. Soon, you’ll have a system for balancing your primary writing work with pressure-release strategies that alleviate the strain, restore authenticity, and bring engagement back to your first draft.
The goal isn’t to never think about your writing. The goal is to develop a sensitivity for knowing when to think about your writing.
The first draft is the ideal time to let your unconscious mind fly, allowing your ideas the room to emerge and become. You will have a hefty clean-up job in subsequent drafts, but better that than not having enough material or having material that fails to excite or inspire.
♦ First, generate. Then, evaluate.
♦ First, let the mess happen. Then, shape it into something beautiful.
Remembering that writing is a process—something that happens in stages—is vital.
Your first draft is merely the vessel into which you’re allowing your essential thoughts to pour. It will be seen by no one but you, so you can belt it out like you do in the shower when no one is home.
And it can have that same deep gusto and delight that comes when you feel free to be your true self, with no one judging or scrutinizing the outcome.
For now, always remember that the secret to writing a great first draft is to shut off your mind, trust yourself, and just write.
To support our writers get as thoughtlessly through your first draft as possible, we have our 4-month book-writing programs in the novel, memoir, and business/nonfiction. Check out the one that’s right for you and start writing your book—today!
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