The Joy and Terror of the First Draft

Working on the first draft

A deep dive into the mental state required for getting words on the page without judging them

The cursor blinks. It's been blinking for twenty minutes now, mocking me with each pulse. I've written three opening sentences and deleted them all. Too pretentious. Too casual. Too... something. This is the dance I do with first drafts—this strange waltz between wanting desperately to write and being terrified of what might come out if I actually let myself.

If you write, you know this feeling. That peculiar mix of excitement and dread that comes with a blank page. The first draft is where everything begins, but it's also where we're most vulnerable, most exposed. It's the moment when we have to silence every voice that tells us we're not good enough and just... write.

Today, I want to talk about that mental space—the one required to get words on the page without judging them. Because for years, I got this wrong. I thought writing meant producing polished prose from the start. I thought "real" writers didn't struggle with messy first drafts. I was wrong about all of it.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves About the First Draft

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: first drafts are supposed to be terrible. Not just mediocre or rough around the edges—genuinely, spectacularly bad. Anne Lamott called them "shitty first drafts," and honestly, she was being kind. My first drafts read like they were written by someone who learned English last Tuesday and is also maybe having a stroke.

But for the longest time, I didn't know this was normal. I thought the difference between me and "real" writers was that they sat down and the words just flowed out, perfect and polished. That my struggle to produce anything coherent meant I didn't have what it takes.

The perfectionism was crushing. I'd write a paragraph, read it back, decide it was garbage, and spend the next hour trying to fix it. By the time I'd wrestled those opening lines into something acceptable, the momentum was gone. The next paragraph was even harder. Eventually, I'd give up entirely, convinced I just wasn't meant to be a writer.

What I've learned since then—slowly, painfully, through countless abandoned drafts and false starts—is that this approach is backwards. The first draft isn't about quality. It's about existence. You can't edit a blank page. You can't refine words that don't exist yet.

The mental shift required here is profound: You have to give yourself permission to write badly. Not as a failure, but as a necessary step in the process.

The Mental State of Creation

There's a particular headspace you need to access to write a first draft. It's not confidence, exactly, though that helps when you can muster it. It's not inspiration either, though that's a nice bonus when it shows up. It's something closer to surrender—a willingness to let go and see what happens.

Athletes talk about "the zone." Psychologists call it "flow state." For writers, it's that elusive place where words come faster than your internal critic can catch them, where you're discovering the story as much as creating it, where time becomes elastic and three hours pass in what feels like thirty minutes.

Getting to that state requires deliberate practice and a kind of mental preparation. For me, it starts with a few essential rituals.

First, I remind myself that nobody will see this draft. Not my imagined critics, not future readers, not even my own harsh future self during revisions. This is the sandbox version—the place where I get to play without consequences. The moment I internalize this, the pressure starts to lift.

Second, I set a goal that has nothing to do with quality. Write for twenty minutes. Put down 500 words. Fill one page. The target isn't "write something good"—it's simply "write." This removes judgment from the equation and replaces it with the achievable satisfaction of showing up and doing the work.

Third—and this one changed everything for me—I silence the editor. I turn off spell-check. Sometimes I write in a bare-bones program that doesn't show me what I've written, just a blank screen and a growing word count. Other times I write by hand, in messy cursive I can barely read later, because the physical act of forming letters bypasses some of the mental tripwires that snag me on a keyboard.

These aren't just tricks. They're ways of protecting that fragile creative state from the inner voice that wants to shut everything down before it begins.

The Terror of Honest Writing

Here's something nobody warned me about: first drafts are revealing. When you write without a filter, without stopping to shape and curate and present the "right" version of yourself, things come out. Uncomfortable things. Surprising things. True things you didn't know you thought until you saw them on the page.

This is part of the terror. Writing without judgment means confronting not just the blank page, but yourself. Your fears, your contradictions, your unresolved feelings—they all tumble out when you're not carefully editing every sentence in real-time.

I've started essays about one topic only to realize, three pages in, that I'm actually writing about something entirely different. Something deeper. Something I wasn't ready to acknowledge consciously. Those moments are unsettling. You can't unsee what you've written. You can't unknown what you've discovered about yourself.

But—and this is important—this vulnerability is also the source of authentic writing. The kind that resonates with readers isn't the carefully polished, perfectly presented stuff. It's the stuff that feels true. Raw. Human. And you can't get there without first wading through the mess of a genuine first draft.

There have been drafts where a character said something I didn't plan, where an argument took a turn I didn't anticipate, and suddenly I understood something about myself or the world that I couldn't have articulated before I wrote it. Those moments are electric. They're why we do this, even when it's hard, even when it's scary.

The Trap of Stopping

One of my biggest mistakes early on was stopping to fix things mid-draft. I'd write a sentence, reread it, hate it, and spend ten minutes tinkering. By the time I'd revised those opening lines into something acceptable, the flow was broken. The next sentence was even harder to start.

First drafts demand forward motion. It's like riding a bike—you need momentum to stay upright. Stop to adjust every wobble and you'll never get anywhere.

Now when I know something's wrong, I just mark it: [fix this later]. Sometimes I write [I have no idea what I'm trying to say here, come back to this] and keep going. The important thing is to reach the end, even if the path there is crooked and full of placeholder notes.

This feels reckless at first. Every instinct screams that you're wasting time, that you should fix it now while you remember what you meant. But that's the perfectionist's lie. You'll never have perfect clarity in the first draft. You're building the structure, not decorating the rooms. There's time for that later.

The key is trusting that future-you will be able to fix the problems current-you is struggling with. And honestly? Future-you usually can, because you'll have the benefit of seeing the whole draft, understanding where it's going, what it's really about.

The Unexpected Joy

Despite all the terror, all the vulnerability, all the self-doubt—there's genuine joy in first drafts. A satisfaction that's hard to describe but impossible to replicate any other way.

When I finish a first draft, even when I know it's a mess, there's this moment of pure accomplishment. I've created something that didn't exist before. Words on a page. A story told, however imperfectly. An argument made, a feeling expressed, a world imagined from nothing.

That feeling is worth protecting. It's easy to forget it later, when you're deep in revision hell, but the first draft is where creation happens. Everything else is refinement. Editing is necessary, vital even—but it's not the same as the act of bringing something into being.

I've come to love first drafts in a way I never expected. Not because they're easy—they're not. Not because they're good—they rarely are. But because they're honest. They're the place where I discover what I actually think, what I really want to say, before all the filters and second-guessing kick in.

There's freedom in that messiness. In knowing that this draft doesn't have to be the final version, doesn't have to be shown to anyone, doesn't have to be anything except an exploration. It's play, in the truest sense—the kind of unstructured, curious experimentation that we lose touch with as adults but that's essential to creativity.

What Actually Works

I'm not going to pretend I've mastered this. There are still days when the blank page wins, when the terror overwhelms the joy, when I spend more time avoiding writing than actually writing. But I've learned a few things that help.

Writing at the same time each day trains your brain. Even if it's just fifteen minutes before work or late at night after everyone's asleep, consistency builds the habit. Your mind learns when it's supposed to create, and resistance gradually decreases.

Sometimes I need constraints to break through paralysis. Total creative freedom can be overwhelming. So I'll give myself a weird rule: write this scene from an unexpected point of view, or tell this story without using a particular word, or set a timer for ten minutes and don't let the fingers stop moving. The artificiality of the constraint somehow unlocks something real.

Talking it out helps. Some of my best breakthroughs happen when I'm explaining an idea to a friend, a supportive family member, or even just to myself out loud. The conversational tone, the thinking-while-speaking quality—it often captures something more natural than formal writing does. Sometimes I'll record myself rambling about what I want to write, then transcribe it. The draft is terrible, but it's a starting point.

And here's one that sounds counterintuitive: I end my writing sessions mid-sentence. Hemingway's trick. When I sit down the next day, I know exactly where to start, and that momentum carries me forward instead of facing another blank page.

We're All Struggling Together

One of the most helpful realizations has been this: every writer deals with this. Every single one. The bestselling authors you admire, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the bloggers and poets and journalists—they all have shitty first drafts. They all face that voice saying "this is garbage, why are you even trying?"

The difference between writers who finish things and writers who don't isn't talent. It's the willingness to sit with the discomfort of creating something imperfect. It's showing up even on days when every word feels like pulling teeth. It's trusting the process when the process feels hopeless.

When I share my struggles with first drafts—the false starts, the days where nothing works, the projects I've abandoned and later resurrected—other writers always respond with recognition. We're all fighting the same battles against the same internal critics. There's comfort in that shared struggle, in knowing that the terror is universal, and so is the joy of pushing through it.

Permission to Be Imperfect

So here's what I want you to take from this: your first draft doesn't have to be good. It just has to exist.

Give yourself permission to write badly. Embrace the mess. Let yourself discover things as you go, even if what you discover is uncomfortable. The terror you feel when facing that blank page isn't a sign you're doing it wrong—it's a sign you're doing something that matters.

The joy is on the other side of the terror. Not necessarily in the polished final product, though that's satisfying too, but in the act of creation itself. In the moment when words start flowing and you forget to be afraid. In the discovery of an idea you didn't know you had. In the simple, profound satisfaction of showing up and doing the work, even when it was hard.

Your first draft is waiting. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be written.

Thank you for reading this honest reflection on the writing process. If you're struggling with your own first drafts, know that you're not alone in that struggle. May you find the courage to start and the stubbornness to keep going, one imperfect word at a time.