21 Ways Not to Finish a First Draft

Writers can come up with a lot of reasons for not finishing a first draft, and some of them even sound plausible. I know the real reasons. (And I’ve got a solution.)

But first, here’s how to stop yourself from completing a first draft.

1. Fall in love with the thrill of new ideas, but don’t fall in love with the work it takes to execute them.
2. Need to begin at the beginning and make it perfect before you move on.
3. Wait to find the time to write.
4. Leave the work before you can get through a difficult patch of writing.
5. Abandon the current writing project for a new and better writing project.
6. And then abandon that project for another one.
7. Seek praise from others, show embryonic work, and then be broken by how people react to it.
8. Write as if you’re being watched.
9. Decide too soon what the piece is about, don’t allow yourself to wander off the trail you’ve set, and feel trapped into following the original path.
10. Compare your writing to the writing of others.
11. Judge and discount your work prematurely—early in the draft or even before you get anything down on paper.
12. Talk about it instead of writing it.
13. Think  about it instead of writing it.
14. Think you need to write in a certain order. “I can’t write the next scene—chapter, line, paragraph—until I write this one.”
15. Think it should be easy.
16. Think it’s easy for other people but not you.
17. Think you’ve got to get it right the first time.
18. Think you’ll run out things to say.
19. Think your writing doesn’t matter.
20. Think you need to know in the beginning how it all turns out in the end.
21. Romanticize writer’s block.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I have, at one time or another, taken just about every route on the list. And sometimes I can still be found wandering some of those paths to nowhere until I recognize what I’m doing (or shall I say not doing?) and make a course correction.

Let me be blunt and honest here about the last item on the list: Romanticizing writer’s block. We might feel we’re members of some cool writer’s club even when we’re not producing work if we can say we have writer’s block. (Heck, movies are made about it. )

But we don’t feel quite so cool when we have admit to what writer’s block really is — crippling fear and anxiety.

In fact, every item I’ve listed above is an avoidance behavior rooted in fear and anxiety.

But once you cop to being scared and understand that it’s normal to feel anxiety about a writing project in development and fear about it not being good enough, it can get easier to move forward in spite of those feelings.

It would be healthier, I believe, if writers would talk honestly with each other about how scary writing can be, how difficult the process is, instead of romanticizing the idea of writer’s block.

Here’s how to finish that first draft: Get comfortable with discomfort.

When you start a new writing project, you can’t be sure how it will turn out. No one is, not even the pros.

Remember: You don’t have to get it right the first time.

Uncertainty is inherent in the writing process. Accept the discomfort of uncertainty, make friends with it, invite it to sit next to you as you work, but don’t let it grow into the kind of fear and anxiety that stops you from writing what you are meant to write.

Easier said than done, I know, but accepting discomfort is how you finish that first draft.

Need an extra incentive to push a first draft through to completion? NaNoWriMo starts November 1.

A version of this post appeared in  The Florida Writer, the official magazine of the Florida Writers Association.