The Single-Tasking Secret To A Flawless First Draft

Changing your focus . . . or not

Photo by Rylan Hill on Unsplash

How long is it taking you to write your first book? A year? Three? Five? If it’s taking you forever just to finish a single, solitary first draft and it’s still a sprawling mess of plot holes, half-baked characters, and scenes that go absolutely nowhere, we need to talk.

I remember being there as a new writer. Every time I sat down to write, I felt like I was trying to solve a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in the dark, with pieces from five different boxes. The reality of writing an entire novel with multiple characters, subplots, and motivations was overwhelming. I was drowning in complexity. I’d try to fix a clunky line of dialogue, and suddenly I’d be questioning a character’s entire reason for being. I’d try to patch a plot hole in chapter five and end up rewriting the beginning of the book. It was an endless, frustrating cycle of starting, stopping, and wanting to toss my computer out the nearest window.

The feeling that the project was just too big, too vast, was always there. It felt like this giant, empty canvas I was supposed to fill, and the sheer scale of it was paralyzing. It’s not surprising that the first novel I ever wrote (and the second) I never submitted for publication. They served their purpose as practice stories where I learned…