The Problem With "Just Get the Draft Down"

Sounds like momentum, but it often ends in disappointment.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

I see this EXACT advice all day every day.

Every writer/creator talking about writing eventually says some version of it.

Just get the draft out.

Don’t overthink it. You can fix it later.

Momentum matters more than precision right now.

At this stage of my career, I tune it out completely because it leads writers to disappointment, and I watch it happen over and over.

Does an architect just shit out a blueprint and start pouring concrete?

Does a construction company rush through a build and figure out the structural problems after the building is standing?

No. They take the time to test every piece. They run diligence on the foundation before they layer on more weight, if something is weak, they strengthen or find different methods that hold before they build anything on top of it.

Writing a novel, in my experience and in my opinion, is the same kind of structure, and I cannot for the life of me understand why most advice treats it like it isn’t.

Here’s what usually happens when you “just get the draft out”:

You write fast. You’re hitting plot beats. You tell yourself you’ll fix things later, in revision, once the whole thing exists. I won’t disagree, the momentum feels good. Pages accumulate. It feels like progress.

And then you get to the end. Or near the end. And you start asking the questions you skipped. Would this character actually do this? Does this align with who they are? Does this cause and effect match? Why does this ending feel weak? And sometimes the answer cannot be answered in an easily patched way, or in a way that traces back to a decision you made a hundred pages ago. A moment where the character did something that wasn’t actually them. A moment where you needed the plot to move and you let it move at the cost of psychological truth.

And now everything after that moment is built on a foundation that doesn’t hold.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve watched this happen, to myself early in my career, and to writers I talk to all the time. Months of work. Sometimes the better part of a year.

And the realization arrives that the thing holding the whole structure together gave way somewhere far earlier than where you currently are, which means almost everything written since has to be re-examined, and most of it has to be deleted and rebuilt.

That is an overwhelming thing to face.

For a lot of writers it’s prohibitively overwhelming.

I’ve watched manuscripts get abandoned at this exact point, because the cost of fixing it felt insurmountable.

Here’s what actually upsets me about it.

Maybe the story wasn’t salvageable at that stage.

But it was completely preventable.

So instead, I ask AS MANY questions AS I CAN as I go.

What would this specific character, holding these specific beliefs, say next? How would they respond to what was just said, and sometimes I’m asking that multiple times within a single exchange of dialogue, testing each line against what I know to be true about who this person is.

What would they do hearing this? What would they do witnessing this? Does this align with everything I’ve already established about them? If it doesn’t, why not?

Some of this happens sentence by sentence, especially early in a project, or in scenes where I don’t yet have a complete feel for a character’s internal logic. I’m genuinely slow in those moments, testing line by line, sentence by sentence, because the character isn’t fully alive to me yet and I don’t trust myself to predict them accurately without checking.

But the longer you do this, the more it becomes something closer to instinct. You start knowing the answers as you write them, almost automatically, the character has become specific enough in your mind that you can feel when something is wrong without consciously running the diagnostic.

But it’s never fully automatic.

Something will still slip through occasionally. You’ll feel a wrongness in a line you’ve already written, and that’s the signal to go back and run the questions deliberately again, to find the version of this moment that belongs to the character rather than to you, the writer, reaching for whatever was convenient.

This is the actual cost-benefit at the center of the disagreement I have with “just get the draft out.”

The advice optimizes for speed in the first draft and accepts a potentially catastrophic cost in revision.

I optimize for diligence throughout the draft and accept a slower pace in exchange for never having to demolish months of work because the foundation gave out underneath me.

I will always, every time, prefer slower and structurally sound over fast and prohibitively expensive to fix. That’s not a moral position about craft discipline. It’s just math.

The time you spend writing scenes built on a foundation that doesn’t hold, that’s the wasted time. You just don’t find out you’ve wasted it until much later, when the bill is much larger and much harder to pay.

Slow down. Ask the questions.

Let the answer disagree with your outline if it has to. That disagreement, caught early, is the cheapest thing in the entire writing process.

Caught late, it’s the most expensive.