6 Tips – How to Write A Garbage First Draft

Forcing yourself to write a first draft (when you haven’t written in a dreadfully long time) is a lot like being constipated. The crap will come out … if you’d just ease up a bit.

They say giving yourself permission to write badly can be liberating. Some writers even claim it’s the best advice they’ve ever heard. But what does writing badly even mean? What does it look like?

Let’s talk about writing a trash first draft.

“The first draft is just YOU telling YOURSELF the story.”

– Terry Pratchett

I couldn’t agree with Pratchett more. In fact, for a draft that’s giving you fits, try, “Tell, don’t show.”

TIP 1: TELL, DON’T SHOW.

That’s right, break as many rules as you can. Want to fast draft at blinding speed? Don’t actually write out the conversation… just put:

“Character X and character Y had a discussion about Z.”

Hey, that was easy! You just told us an in-depth conversation happened instead of showing us.

And I’m not being tongue-in-cheek, here. I’m dead serious. For people like me that need to belt out a first draft at all costs, advice like this is priceless if we ever want to see the finish line.

Now, maybe you’d like a bit more to work with, and that’s fair. In that case, you can put what you already know about how the conversation’s probably going to go:

• What’s at stake is a real sticking point for character Y.
• They have a disagreement, and character Y starts to resent X.
• Character Q overhears the tail-end of the conversation and ducks into the shadows, unnoticed.

Then you can put stuff you think MIGHT happen during the conversation, stuff that’s still up-in-the-air:

• Maybe character X notices a detail in the room that could solve a problem he’s struggling with, which makes him aloof and less focused on the conversation, hurting his case with Y even more.
• Maybe character Y is probably going to say something like, “There’s more at stake than…”, etc.

What I just wrote could be a passable first draft of an entire chapter (or at least a scene). That is, passable for you, the writer. It’s certainly not critique ready. But it could be, fairly quickly! Quicker than it could’ve been, at least. It’s a garbage-y rough draft. What did you expect? But it is a rough draft, all the same.

What are rough drafts but sketches? Think of a painting. A rough draft can be light and loose and airy, just a sketch to get an idea of where everything will go. You can shift things around later if necessary, then paint in all the details.

It’s much harder to shift things around once you’ve committed layers of paint to canvas. If you do have to take a wrecking ball to a polished scene, you ironically wind up with a lot of extra stuff you didn’t need. A lot of garbage, one might say. Very polished garbage.

Was my example too sparse for you? No problem! Extrapolate a little more! All we’re doing is expanding our outline like a balloon (if we happen to have an outline), or you might like to think of it more like outlining a scene, albeit in far greater detail than a typical outline would portray.

Expand each section later. Extrapolate scenes to their fullest later. Just make sure you know the relevant arcs before miring yourself in all the details of a scene. Then you can feel good enough to say, “Okay, I’m done with this chapter (for now). Moving on!”

TIP 2: Front-load!

That’s right. Go right into purple prose mode straight away. Front-load your scenes (and even character descriptions) with flowery description. You can even start with the weather. It helps set the mood and eases you right into the action or conversation that needs to happen.

What you’ll do later is take pieces of your description and surgically move them from the top paragraph into proceeding paragraphs, wherever they can be seamlessly integrated. (And yes, some of that purple prose is going to get cut entirely.)

For example, if you front-load a character description, and one of the features you mentioned is round spectacles, move that detail out of the infodump paragraph and have the character adjust their spectacles as a beat between pieces of dialogue. But do it in the second draft!

Don’t forget this is a garbage draft.

If you don’t know what the scene looks like, don’t be afraid to be vague as heck. You can even inject a little humor that no one else will ever see.

“The characters are in a boring, white room. In fact, they are pretty much a pair of floating, talking heads.”

It’s simple, and it’s still a springboard that lets you move forward.

TIP 3: Use Placeholders

When you don’t know every detail of a scene or what a character looks like, you can always use a placeholder.

“Thick, crumbling walls rested at the far end of the sacred grounds. Made of -HERE!-, they weren’t quite as strong as -HERE!-, and bore the tell-tale markings of the ancient tribe of -HERE!-.”

Get it? If you don’t yet know what the currency in your world is called, don’t dwell. Don’t fret. Just type -HERE!-. (Or something that’s easy to search for later.)

TIP 4: Use Forms of “to be” Liberally

You heard me. All your favorites. Use was, would, were, had been, would have, there was, etc. Replace them with stronger verbs and/or restructure later. That’s second draft stuff!

“But the white hair on his balding head had been pinched into slick, horn-like protrusions. His green eyes were studious and observant. And his lips were crooked in an ever-knowing smile.”

Stuff like this isn’t bad, but it makes for an easier first draft and can be strengthened later.

TIP 5: Use Lazy Transitions

Use suddenly, then, next, meanwhile, “began to”, “wasted no time”, etc. Smooth out your transitions later. Fix it in post!

TIP 6: Be Even More Vague

Use almost and “seemed to”. Have characters “start to” do something. Drop this stuff later. Say “a few” and “several”. Decide on concrete numbers LATER.

CONCLUSION

If you’re like me and are trying to see the other side of your first novel’s rough draft at all costs, break the rules!

What are you waiting for? Go forth and put the pedal to the metal! Write like traaaaaash.