What Is A Rough Draft

It’s in the name! IA rough draft is a draft of your writing in its roughest form. The words are raw and have just started to take shape; they are echoes of the idea you have. Completing a rough draft, aka your first draft, is a milestone in itself (though it is not the finished product), but how do we get there?

Here are a few tips that can help you nail that rough draft of your manuscript so that it sets the foundation for your writing!

The First Steps

When starting on your first draft, the most important steps include knowing where you’re going. Whether that means having a vague beginning, middle, and end in your mind, or (if you’re like me) having 5-subject notebooks with detailed outlines (that come with their own drafts), you need a roadmap for your writing.

This map will keep you on track; the details include major events and smaller details that you might forget. For example, I jot down notes in my outlines of what other characters know, where they are, and how they perceive things. However, your roadmap can be much more simple. Here’s an example from a (very) rough draft I wrote for Fiction II in college:

Beginning: Pyrrha flees home to stop the Red Witch.

Middle: Pyrrha loses her familiar and the Red Witch gets away.

End: Pyrrha defeats the Red Witch.

Short and simple. There aren’t a lot of details, but it’s enough to build off of. Your rough draft doesn’t need to be perfect, which leads to our next point.

Write Raw

We’re all guilty of it. We sit down to write with inspiration fueling our fingers and then–nothing. The words are stuck in our heads and you can’t get them out. There's a misconception that your rough draft needs to be perfect. It doesn’t need to have all the details, it doesn’t need to be fully fleshed out, and it doesn’t need to be free of errors.

If you don’t know what needs to be done in a scene, but you know how it needs to go, it’s okay not to write in full detail. For example, I write things like “Pyrrha fights the mages, but the Red Witch escapes in the chaos.” It allows me to get the main idea down before moving on to the next idea. There’s nothing wrong with it!

Listen to Your Gut

The only time when you might want to stop writing is when you’re working on a scene and it’s not working out. Sometimes we start writing in one direction and get lost, but we can find our way by stopping and turning around. Backtrack to the last place that felt right. What happened there? Check in with your characters and see where they would go. As the writer, it’s up to you to figure out how to connect what your character would do with where they need to go based on the plot.

When in doubt, you can always include TBD (to be done) and come back to it later. It’s your first draft! You don’t need to know everything yet.

Putting It All Together

Writing your rough draft can definitely be challenging, but it’s a rewarding experience! Especially when you overcome the challenges that you face in fleshing out an entire story. Novels are a lot of work, but with these tips, you can set the foundation. In my experience, it’s easier to write the second draft when you have the framework from the first draft. Just get the ideas out onto the page so you can continue to build!