What is my first draft supposed to accomplish?

Question: For a new writer, what is most important for the first draft of a book? I find myself thinking, “I wish my sentences were more full and descriptive” and I’m self-editing. Is it more important to just get the plot and dialogue down and worry about the descriptive details later? What do you think?

I love this question! It’s so easy to get caught thinking about a million things in the middle of drafting, so narrowing the scope will save you a lot of frustration.

My recommendation for your first draft is to focus on the plot. The goal is get the ideas down on paper so that you know roughly how you want them to go. It’s likely that the ideas will morph and adjust as you’re writing, and that’s really the goal of the first draft! Ideally, by the end of your first draft, you’ll know roughly what you want the story to be.

Secondarily, it’s a huge win if you start to get a good feel for your characters! They may not have come out fully on the page (it’s your first draft, so you can cut yourself a break), but you can use what you learned about your characters to help you in your next draft.

If lightning strikes and you get a hit of inspiration about a description, a character, or a place, then go for it! But it’s unnecessary pressure on the first draft to try to get more than your plot and characters clear to yourself ! In the immortal words of a Neil Gaiman tweet: “Write down everything that happens in the story, and then in your second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”

Having your plot and characters reasonably clear by the end of the first draft will make your next drafts so much easier!

But more specifically to the second part of the question: what about my line writing? My emphatic recommendation here is don’t worry about your line writing at this stage! So much will likely change from your first draft to your second draft, so if you work really hard on your line writing, a lot of it may well end up getting changed or scrapped anyway.

Instead, save line writing for your later drafts. Don’t tangle with your sentences until you have the plot nailed down how you want it and a strong sense of your characters and their interactions with each other. You’ll be better served by editing your sentences in the third draft or later.