#Rough draft vs final draft how to
#Rough draft vs final draft professional

The joke is silly, but the point is right-you don’t “find” your voice outside yourself. I’ll often tease authors and ask them things like, “Hey, did you look behind your sofa? Your voice might be there.” “Find” Your Voiceįor some reason, when the book outline is ready, and it’s time to start writing, many authors become obsessed with “finding their voice.” Put it away until you finish the vomit draft. The parts of yourself that want to edit as you go-the perfectionist, the self-critical part-that’s a great editor, but a terrible writer. Once you start editing, that’s when you focus on what people will think. I’m going to say this again: the vomit draft is for you. Use the “comment” function to highlight it and say, “This is your problem, Future Me,” and then move on. If you think something is terrible and you hate it, that’s fine. The bully in your brain, the part of you that’s ridiculously hard on yourself, will start to second-guess you and shame you and will, at best, slow you down-if not kill your motivation altogether. If you edit as you write, it totally derails your book. It creates momentum through daily victories (getting 250 words per day and celebrating that adds up and reframes how you see yourself).Using the Vomit Draft Method does two things: If you edit during the vomit draft stage, the best-case scenario is that you’ll double the amount of time it takes you to write the book. I don’t care who you are-if you start editing your vomit draft, you WILL get stuck. The quickest way to derail a vomit draft is to start editing before you finish. “I will not edit my vomit draft until I am done writing it.” In fact, I want you to say this out loud, right now: I cannot be more serious or literal about this. MOVE FORWARD UNTIL YOUR VOMIT DRAFT IS DONE. Write your vomit draft as quickly as possible. Let me repeat that and break it down to be very clear and sure you got it: Move forward without looking back until your vomit draft is done. This might be the most important advice you’ll ever get about writing a first draft, so pay attention: Write Your Vomit Draft Without Stopping To Edit Even your editor won’t see it because you’ll edit it yourself first.īy focusing on just getting it out, you’ll stop reading and editing as you go, which inevitably slows you down (and even stalls you). You’re the only person who will ever see it.

What’s cool about the vomit draft, unlike vomiting in front of people, is that your vomit draft is ONLY for you. And the only way to get it all out is to keep going through the pain. You just want to get it all out-because that’s the only way to get it over with. That’s because when you’re vomiting, you don’t care about looking beautiful or being elegant. We literally call the first draft the “vomit draft.” Many people struggle with giving themselves permission to write a mediocre first draft, so we developed a concept called the “vomit draft.” Revise until it’s not a bad book.” The Wonders of the “Vomit Draft” To begin, give yourself permission to write a bad book.Ģ. The famous Barbara Kingsolver quote says it all: They’re terrible.īut that doesn’t bother me because I know I can edit them until they aren’t terrible.

#Rough draft vs final draft professional

I can tell you, as a professional writer who has written multiple New York Times best-sellers, my first drafts are utter garbage. Most beginning authors have this notion that professional writers put out amazing first drafts, or that their first draft has to be really good. Give yourself permission to write a mediocre first draft. When you sit down to write, you need to do something very simple but very powerful: Give Yourself Permission to Write a Mediocre First Draft

#Rough draft vs final draft how to

Then, if that is still daunting to you, I will tell you about how to add the Scribe Method on to the Vomit Draft Method, which makes tackling your first draft even easier.

In this post, I will walk you through the best method for writing your first draft (we call it the Vomit Draft Method). It addresses and breaks through the mindset issues that hold beginning Authors back, and makes it a lot easier and faster for most people to write a book. That’s why we developed the Scribe Method. The problems tend to arise more with the mindset around writing than with the writing itself.

Nor is the problem that they don’t know how to write. The problem is rarely that Authors don’t know how to express their ideas. They usually have a lot of really bad ideas about what their first draft is supposed to be like and how they are supposed to write it-and these ideas end up keeping them from ever finishing (or even from starting in some cases). One of the biggest hurdles beginning writers have to face is the first draft.