The tldr; answer to the question of what’s the best way to write a first draft is this: as quickly as possible. This is true no matter what you’re drafting: blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, or books.

It took me years to learn this simple lesson. I wasted at least a good two years during my PhD because I refused to write a quick, messy first draft.

The stories we writers tell ourselves

We writers are prone to telling ourselves dangerous stories about writing. Like the one where we’re led to believe that if we take our time and really think things through at the beginning, we’ll save ourselves time later.

Where do we imagine we’ll save this time? In the editing phase.

We think this because we’re convinced that if we work hard enough for long enough, we’ll produce a beautifully polished first draft.

That’s not how writing works.

Perfect drafting is the fancy name for wasting time trying to write a beautifully polished first draft.

When we perfect draft, we waste hours or days (or, for the 'over achievers', months) staring at a blank page, or blinking cursor on a blank screen, waiting for the gods of writing to inspire us with the right first word or sentence.

Then we repeat this time-consuming, soul-destroying process for each subsequent word or sentence.

Writing this way is hard. And it feels hard.

You may have noticed that at the beginning of this subsection I switched from first-person singular (I) to first-person plural (we). I did that to bring you along on this journey and to make the point that precious few writers ‘naturally’ write the easy way.

Most of us try to perfect draft because most of the writing instruction we received at school was for writing exams. When you’re writing an exam, your first draft is, necessarily, your final draft.

Exams are hard. They’re meant to be. And, there are a great many important discussions to be had about whether or not exams serve any real purpose, beyond torturing school children and their parents and teachers, but this is neither the time nor the place.

For our purposes, the most important point about exams is that you’re not at school.

Writing for your business is not an exam.

You are allowed to write the easy way

I don’t write or coach fiction, but writing a (very bad) novel in a month finally helped me break the perfect drafting habit.

If you’ve heard me talk about that novel before, you know that I drafted it several years ago during National Novel Writing Month (which, for complicated reasons is no longer running). While I did not enjoy writing fiction (hence not writing anymore of it), writing 50,000 words in 30 days taught me that I could write quickly.

When I then applied that process to writing my first book, There’s a Book in Every Expert (That’s You!), I found what had long been missing in my writing process: ease and joy.

By that point, I’d been teaching writing for almost two decades. I knew how to write the easy way – that’s what I’d been teaching my students for years. Their writing was allowed to be easy. I didn’t then believe mine was.

What changed?

In the intense process of writing a novel in a month, I finally accepted that my first draft just needed to be done – not pretty, not perfect, done. I also learned that writing a messy draft didn’t hurt me or anyone else.

You don’t have to go to such extremes, however. You could try setting a timer for an hour and writing a messy draft of your next blog post (or whatever it is you’re trying to write).

What would a messy blog post draft look like?

You could start with the outlining technique I teach in How to Decide What to Write - focus on steps 4 and 5 (this process gets quicker with practice).

Then, simply write answers to each question in your outline as quickly as possible.

Don’t worry about

• Where to put subheadings or how to word them
• What your key word/phrase is or how many times you’ve used it (aka, SEO)
• How the post will rank on Google
• How you’re going to repurpose it to make sure people actually read what you write
• Which words are best or where the commas go

Just write. Answer the questions like you would if you were talking to someone about what you’re writing about.

When you talk to people about what you do, you don’t obsess over punctuation and word choice, and you probably don’t think about SEO at all – unless that’s what you help your clients with.

Instead, you just answer their questions, taking care to explain each point clearly and thoroughly.

There’s no reason you can’t write about what you do the same way. It doesn’t need to be any harder than talking about it.

How to make messy drafting easier

Learning to messy draft is a process. For most of us, it’s not a one and done – so it’s not as easy as saying to yourself, ‘Right, I’m not going to perfect draft anymore.’

Each messy draft you write is a step in the process of unlearning a habit that’s been ingrained for years. That habit’s not going to let go easily.

I still sometimes put Post-It notes on my screen that say, ‘The first draft’s only job is to be done!’ or ‘Don’t perfect draft!’

What can you do to make it easier? Try any or all of these:

• Write with others. Meet with at least one other writer and tell them at the beginning of the writing session that you’re going to write a messy draft of your next blog post (or newsletter or book chapter). Then, at the end of the session, tell them how it went. This works because you won’t want to tell them that instead of writing, you stared at your screen for an hour (or two) trying to think of the right first word.
• Break out your crayons and brightly coloured unlined paper – if you’ve known me long, you knew this one was coming. Your inner critic won’t judge what you write in purple crayon on bright yellow paper, for example. Why not? Because she’s never seen you publish such material. Writing in crayon invites your inner critic to step out of the way so you can get your ideas out.
• Try dictating your first draft – use the speech to text tool in Google Docs or Word, use the dictation app that’s likely already on your phone, or record a Zoom call of yourself and pull the transcript. You have the technology, so use it. One word of warning: make sure you have time shortly after recording your draft to edit it while you remember what you were saying. I used this technique for part of the first draft of my third book, Ready to Publish, and the speech-to-text tool repeatedly heard something I was saying (I really wish I remembered what) as broccoli. I like broccoli, but I didn’t discuss it even once in that draft.

Need some help?

If you need some help getting out of your own way so you can write a messy draft, sign up for my mini course (£40). It’s aimed at people writing blog posts, but it teaches the same outlining process I use for everything I write and coach.

If you complete the 3 steps (and email them to me for feedback), you’ll get a free 121 coaching call to discuss whatever writing issue you want. This would be an excellent space for talking about what’s stopping you from writing a messy draft.