Write Your First Draft for Yourself: there are no rules

Go ahead, write that first draft with a feather. It’s all good.

by Anne R. Allen

Recently I’ve been looking at comment threads on old posts. Five years ago, people were leaving a lot more comments. But commenting on blogs has faded along with the popularity of blogging, which a lot of people see as soooo last decade. These days, a lot of authors prefer Substack, which is new and shiny.

For now, I’m hanging onto this blog, although it does have a lot of problems, including a weird number of “brute force attacks”— where hackers use bots to try 1000s of passwords a minute to try to break in. Generally the server has to take the blog offline to protect it.

Why these hackers want to break into a non-monetized author blog is beyond me, but then I don’t know why I still get dozens of requests every week from people who want to regale our audience of writers with articles about buying real estate in Dubai, making cat food in an air fryer, or what to wear to a Taylor Swift concert.

But as I perused the old comments, I saw that a lot of them were spectacularly clueless. Often 30% of them showed the commenter hadn’t read a word of the post. So commenting in the old days didn’t actually mean a lot more people were reading the blog.

On a post offering tips for writing your first chapter, I got a whole string of comments saying I was stifling creativity by making up rules and forcing authors obsess about their first chapters.

My first tip? “#1 Don’t obsess about your first chapter.”

Yup.

So I’m going to repeat it now, for visitors who still read the actual blogposts.

Don’t Obsess About That First Chapter

One of the comments came from a beginning writer who was putting a lot more energy into obsessing than actually writing. They were obviously Googling like mad trying to find out all the rules so they wouldn’t break any, poor dear. They had written 1000 whole words and were worried about how long a first chapter needs to be.

The real answer: as many words as it takes. And you won’t know how many that is until you write the whole book. I didn’t say that to this fledgling writer, because I knew they were unlikely to finish their novel if I said anything discouraging. Why? Because they were spending so much energy obsessing about chapter one, I feared they’d never get past it.

So if you’re a first-time novelist, stop agonizing. Sketch out the first chapter and get on with putting your story onto the page.

Here’s the thing: you’re probably going to end up with an opening chapter that’s very different from the one you started with. Your entire first chapter may end up being one of those darlings you have to kill. (Or move to another spot in the book.)

When you edit, you can decide where the story really starts (Some writing teachers say the average student novel starts at chapter three.)

As for backstory — yes, you need it, but you can sneak bits of it into several chapters so it doesn’t choke the flow of the narrative.

The Secret to Actually Finishing a First Draft

They say 97% of people who start novels never finish them.

So if you want to belong to that 3% who finish, please, stop worrying about “rules.” Just write.

I’m going to say it again: there is no right way to write a first draft. You can put butt in chair, hands on keyboard and aim for a strict wordcount, or handwrite with a sharpie on a pile of paper napkins at your local watering hole — or hey, make your own ink and write with a feather on parchment.

Nobody cares. There are no rules for a first draft. That’s the key to going the distance. (And letting the creativity in.) Maybe when you finally write “the end” on that first draft, you will hate what you’ve written. You may declare it what Anne Lamott called a “sh**ty first draft.” Or maybe you will swell with pride at your completed masterpiece.

Either way, what you need to do now is close the file or put those napkins in a drawer and let the whole project rest for a couple of weeks. Go out and celebrate. You made it to the 3%!

Writing for YOU

When you’re writing that first draft, you’re writing for yourself. Later, you’ll edit for your reader. That’s when “the rules” are important.

But when writing the first draft, you’re telling yourself the story and getting to know your characters. You may have a bunch of false starts, meandering subplots, and indigestible chunks of backstory. That’s normal. And probably necessary.

That ten-page chapter you wrote with a flashback to the summer when your protagonist’s great aunt made him drink a glass of spoiled milk might bore your reader to tears. But it tells you, the author, what makes your hero have such an irrational fear of dairy products.

If you wait a week or two to read your completed opus, you’ll be able to read while wearing a reader hat, instead of an author hat. The reader will tell you where you’ve got a rip-roaring narrative, and where you’ve wandered too far away from the story.

When You Put on Your “Reader Hat,” You are the Alpha Reader

There’s a lot of talk in writing circles about “alpha” and “beta” readers. Some of the talk is just silly. Some people have even confused “alpha reader” with the term “alpha male,” meaning the “leader of the pack.” (Or in incel-speak, a misogynist rapist “influencer” with the insight and intelligence of a rhinoceros in heat.) Please disabuse yourself of this. It means “alpha” in the sense of the first letter of the Greek alphabet. “Beta” is simply the second reader, named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet — not in any way “less than.”

The terms “alpha” and “beta” reader originally came from the gaming industry. Early game developers would ask certain customers to test games before they went on the market. These were not the “alpha” users who worked on actually developing the game, but “betas” who tested the game when it was about to go into the marketplace. They helped find glitches and could give marketers an idea of their target audience.

So as the “alpha” reader, it’s now time for you to read your opus with a critical eye. Oh, woops, did you leave little cousin Ginny out in the woods with the werewolves without ever wrapping up her storyline? Did you repeat the word “wolverine” seven times on page 86?  Did Gwendolyn turn into Garrison halfway through chapter five?

Your first read-through is when you fix those glaring glitches. That’s what writing the second draft is about.

When you write a second draft, you can worry about “the rules” all you want. (Just make sure they are real rules and not stupid ones.)

And you still want to avoid obsessing about that first chapter. Leave the obsessing for the final draft — after the betas have had their say.

***

by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen, @annerallen.bsky.social) July 6, 2025

What about you, scriveners? Do you obsess about your first chapter before you go on to write the whole book? Did you do that once and get over it? Have you given up on “stupid writing rules”?

BOOK OF THE WEEK

On this holiday weekend, I don’t feel like celebrating what my country has become, but I can celebrate the pioneers, immigrants, and indigenous people who built it. One was my great, great, grandmother, Roxanna Britton.

Roxanna Britton: A Biographical Novel

by Shirley S. Allen (Anne’s mom.)

“Jane Austen meets Laura Ingalls Wilder”

The ebook is available at Amazon, Kobo & Nook.

The paperback is available at Amazon

This novel, by my mother, the late Dr. Shirley S. Allen, is a rip-roaring tale of how the west was won. It also happens to be all true. It’s the story of my great, great grandmother, Roxanna Britton, who pioneered the Old West as a young widow with two small children.

It’s got romance, action, cowboys (not always the good guys) Indians (some very helpful ones) the real Buffalo Bill Cody, and a whole lot more!

Widowed as a young mother in 1855, Roxanna breaks through traditional barriers by finding a husband of her own choice, developing her own small business, and in 1865, becoming one of the first married women to own property. We follow her through the hard times of the Civil War to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to a homestead in Nebraska to her final home in Elsinore, California