Ten Tips for Finishing Your First Draft

Whether you’re writing a thesis paper or a novel, first drafts (also known as rough drafts) are notoriously difficult to finish. You may experience the intimidation of a blank screen, the infernal blinking of a cursor, or the lurking fear that whatever you write isn’t going to be good enough. But remember: you’re not the only one with first-draft blues. Realizing that we aren’t alone in our writing struggles and experiences is often a good way to frame your own work. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all come out all right in the end, even if we did lose sleep to get there. These are my ten tips for finishing your first draft, and I hope they help you reach your goal!

1. Create an Outline

Outlining is the pre-draft of whatever you’re writing. It’s a bit like setting out all of your ingredients before you start baking. Outlining helps keep you organized as you write, and the longer your piece, the more helpful it is to have an outline. They don’t need to be complicated; at its core, an outline is just a list of where you want to go with what you’re writing, and how you’re going to get there. When you’ve done each part, you can go back and cross it off so that you know you’ve done it, and you don’t have to keep searching through your document to figure out what you still need to do. For this post, my outline was a list of tips at the top of my document; then I went and reordered them in a way I thought made the most sense, and deleted them as I wrote.

2. Find a Quiet Place

Plenty of people have told me they need background noise or music in order to be productive. For the sake of your first draft, I’m asking you to ignore this instinct. If this tip doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t; but I do think it’s worth a try. A quiet place, with few, if any, other people, is a place without distractions. Distractions keep us from focusing on our thoughts and on our writing. The solitude and silence might be uncomfortable at first, since we generally live our lives surrounded by other people in a flurry of activity. But being isolated while writing (even just to get started, or through a tough part of the writing) allows you to focus wholly on your thoughts and how you want to present them.

3. Hide, Don’t Seek

This tip goes along with finding a quiet place to work. A phone is a distraction waiting to happen, and the buzz of a text or a social media notification is going to shatter your hard-earned concentration. When I really need to focus on something, I turn my phone off. Sometimes I even put it somewhere I can’t see it—under a pillow, in a drawer, or in another room. If you can’t see your phone, you’re much less likely to be distracted by it. Just write yourself a note so you remember where you left it.

4. Jazz Up Your Document

If you’re following these tips in order (you don’t have to; go ahead and break convention), then you are currently well-settled in a quiet place with few distractions. Your outline means you’re organized and ready to write—but that Microsoft Word document is just so plain and white, and completely unappealing. This might be my favorite tip of all, just because I think it’s the most fun. If you go to the “Design” tab of Word, then all the way to the right, you should see a “Page Color” button. Click it and unleash the rainbow! Having a different colored background helps me feel less anxious when writing because the page itself looks more friendly and fun. Sometimes I change colors when I’ve been writing for a while, just to give my eyes something new to look at.

5. Fill in the Blank Space

Even if you’ve recolored your document, the blinking cursor on a blank page can be intimidating. There’s a lot of space to fill, and it’s often overwhelming to see all the space you need to cover. I usually write a first line on the document, just so it’s there. If you think this is too much, feel free to skip it. But I like to look at the top of what I’m writing and see something like “You can do it!” as I write; it’s nice motivation. If you decide to do this, highlight your note; you don’t want it in the final draft, and highlighting means you’re likely to see it and delete it before the piece is officially finished.

6. Talk to Yourself

This is where a quiet place comes in handy again. Sometimes, it’s hard to translate what we want to say, and how, into the written word. So talk yourself through the hard parts. Think out loud. Talking myself through what I’m writing helps me straighten out what I want to say and how I want it to sound, but it also helps relieve tension. If I casually talk through what I’m writing, I don’t feel as stressed when I get stuck because I can tell I’m working on solving the problem—I can hear myself coming up with a solution.

7. Don’t be Picky

Editing while you’re writing is detrimental to finishing your first draft. You’ll get there eventually, but you can save time and headaches by ignoring what isn’t perfect and focusing on what still needs to be done. This is only the first draft; make a note of what you don’t like (you can highlight it or tag it with a comment using the comment function), and go back and fix it later. The most important thing about the first draft is finishing it.

8. Take Five

When you’ve been working hard on something, it’s always important to take a break. Don’t burn yourself out before you reach the finish line. Breaks can be simple and short. Take a few minutes to close your eyes and not look at the computer screen, take a short walk, or do a few stretches. If you feel in need of a longer break, go ahead and take one. Your goal is not necessarily to finish your first draft in one day (unless you’ve left it until the night before), but to work on it steadily and efficiently. If you’ve done enough work that you feel comfortable with where you are, leave the draft and come back to it another time.

9. Go On, You Deserve It

Whenever I’ve had to write something that really stressed me out or was hard to get through, I instigated a reward system. Giving myself little rewards for making it to “checkpoints” (for instance, halfway done, or fixing a complicated problem) helped me stay motivated and positive. Breaks and social media are good rewards, as is candy, if you have it. When I can, I reward myself with Hershey’s Kisses! Whatever your reward, you deserve it: you’ve come a long way, and worked hard.

10. ‘Til Death Do Us Part

Finishing your first draft isn’t quite the same level of commitment as marriage—you’re probably not going to need to commit to your draft for the rest of your life. Nonetheless, these tips aren’t going to help if you’re not ready to commit to finishing your draft. Remember, it’s only the first one. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or pretty, but the one thing it does have to be is finished. So if nothing else, promise yourself that.

Good luck, and happy writing!

~K