In a new post, Janice Hardy identifies 7 reasons your first draft may suck. “Bad first drafts happen all the time, even to professional authors with dozens of books under their writing belts,” she says. “Writing is a creative endeavor and you can’t force creativity, even if you can plow through it and keep writing when the muse is on vacation.”
Have these happened to you?
- You have no clue what the story’s really about. This can happen when you come up with a great premise, but haven’t figured out your end point. “There’s no cohesive plot or problem to solve, just a lot of random things happening, so the story doesn’t read like a story,” Hardy writes. To fix this, identify the good parts in the draft and try to find the story you’re trying to tell.
- You don’t know whose story it is yet. As above, you might have a great concept, but no character to carry it. This can also be a problem when you have a large cast or are using multiple POV. To fix this, pick a main character. Even in a multi-POV story, there’s usually one character pushing the story forward. Focus on that one.
- The story engine is weak (aka: no goals—motivation—conflict). Is your main character meandering from place to place? Does he wait for things to happen? This problem will require some effort as you go through scene by scene to ID the protagonist’s goal, motivation, and conflict.
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