Are First Drafts Supposed to Be Bad?
Quick answer: Are first drafts supposed to be bad? Yes, and usefully so. Why rough drafts are part of the method, what famous writers' drafts looked like, and how to draft freely.
Yes, first drafts are supposed to be bad, in the specific sense that their job is not to be good. A first draft's only deliverable is existence: a complete account of the story from which a good story can then be built. Expecting publishable prose on the first pass is like expecting a finished house from the scaffolding. Nearly every professional method, from Anne Lamott's famous chapter on deliberately rough first drafts to Terry Pratchett's view of the draft as the writer telling the story to themselves, treats badness as a feature.
This question matters because the belief that drafts should be good is probably the single largest cause of abandoned stories. Writers compare their page one to published page ones, conclude they lack talent, and stop. They are comparing their scaffolding to someone else's finished house.
The longer answer: what 'bad' actually means here
Let us be precise, because 'bad' is doing two different jobs in this question. First drafts are legitimately allowed to be bad at execution: flat sentences, clumsy dialogue, placeholder names, scenes that repeat, tone that wobbles. All of that is cheap to fix later. What a first draft is quietly good at, and the reason it deserves respect, is information: it discovers who the characters are, where the story actually starts, what the ending wants to be. You cannot revise a blank page, and you also cannot outline your way to everything a draft reveals.
There is a spectrum of drafters, and honesty requires admitting it. Some writers, through personality or long practice, produce clean first drafts; they compose slowly, sentence by settled sentence, and their 'first' draft has really absorbed several passes as it went. Others produce chaos at speed. Both are professional methods. The claim is not that all first drafts are terrible; it is that no first draft is obliged to be good, and that treating early badness as diagnostic of talent is a category error.
The strongest version of the principle: a first draft is a message from you to you. Nobody else ever needs to see it, so it cannot fail publicly. Its only failure mode is not existing.
The evidence from working writers
Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird gave the rough first draft its most quoted defence, arguing that all good writing begins with terrible first efforts and that the perfectionist voice must be silenced to get anything down. Ernest Hemingway said versions of the same thing more bluntly in conversation, and his manuscripts back the sentiment: the endings of A Farewell to Arms exist in dozens of handwritten variants, each an admission that the early attempts were not right.
Archives are the great comfort here. Jane Austen's surviving manuscript pages show heavy interlinear correction. Tolstoy's wife famously recopied War and Peace drafts as he mutilated them with revisions. Raymond Carver's drafts shrank by half between versions. Zadie Smith has described rereading early drafts with something close to horror, and John Steinbeck's journal while writing The Grapes of Wrath is a record of a man convinced, daily, that the book failing, while producing a masterpiece. If the greats drafted rough and doubted hard, roughness and doubt cannot be evidence against you.
How to draft badly on purpose, and well
Grant yourself explicit permission before each session; it sounds soft and works like machinery. Some writers type a header: 'Draft zero, nobody sees this.' Then protect momentum with rules. No rereading more than a paragraph back. No fixing names, facts or sentences: drop brackets, [her sister's job?], [better line here], and keep going. No deleting scenes; mark them dead and write the replacement after. Momentum is the entire technology of the first draft.
Separate the two mindsets by time of day or by session: create in one, criticise in another, never both at once. If the inner critic is loud, lower the stakes further: write the scene as a summary in plain speech, 'then she finds the letter and pretends she has not', because summary can be dramatised later, and a story fully summarised is a story that exists.
One more professional trick: stop each session mid-scene, where the next sentence is obvious. Tomorrow's page then starts itself, and the draft crosses the finish line on accumulated small easy starts rather than daily heroism.
Common mistakes and misconceptions
Misconception one: 'supposed to be bad' means never trying to write well. No; you write as well as flows freely, you just refuse to stop when it does not. The rule removes the obligation of quality, not the possibility. Misconception two: bad drafts license bad finals. The permission slip has a second page, and it says revision. The whole bargain is speed now, rigour later; keep both halves.
Mistake one: showing a first draft to readers, then absorbing their reaction as a verdict on the story rather than on scaffolding. Cool it and revise before any eyes touch it; even contest deadlines allow a cleanup pass, and a story that has had one reads a class above one that has not, something blind judging with a published rubric, as Writory's story contest runs, makes visible quickly. Mistake two: rereading yesterday's pages each morning and sinking into repair; that is how drafts die at chapter three. Mistake three: taking draft pain as a sign the story is wrong. Draft pain is weather. Finish anyway; you cannot judge a story you have not let end.
What poets can take from this
- Give the draft a name that lowers stakes: draft zero, the telling, nobody-sees-this.
- Use brackets for every problem and keep typing; fixing is a different job on a different day.
- Reread no more than one paragraph back during drafting sessions.
- Stop mid-scene so tomorrow starts itself.
- Draft and criticise in separate sessions, never simultaneously.
- Judge a first draft on one criterion only: does it reach the end?
Try it yourself
Write the worst first draft you can of a story about a lifeguard who is afraid of the sea: clichés allowed, brackets everywhere, summary instead of scenes where needed, 1,000 words minimum, finished today. Next week, revise it and note how much of the 'bad' draft survived.
Questions
Should you edit while writing a first draft?
For most writers, no: mid-draft editing trades momentum, the draft's scarcest resource, for polish that structural revision may delete anyway. Fixing the odd typo is harmless; rewriting yesterday's scene every morning is how drafts stall. Draft forward, revise afterwards.
How bad is too bad for a first draft?
There is no too bad, only incomplete. A draft that is all summary, placeholder names and broken scenes but reaches an ending has succeeded; an exquisite forty pages that stops has not. The single quality bar worth keeping is that you can understand your own intentions when you return.
Do professional writers really write bad first drafts?
Many do, and say so: Anne Lamott built a famous teaching principle on it, and manuscript archives of Austen, Tolstoy and Carver show heavy rewriting. Some professionals draft clean and slow instead. What none rely on is the first attempt being the final one.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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