Are you hurting right now? I’m sorry. Times can get bad. Life can sometimes be down right shitty. Maybe you relapsed for the first time, or even the tenth time. Maybe you had a panic attack and isolated yourself from friends and family today. Maybe you’re someone who thinks they don’t have any friends or family to care about them. For whatever it is you’re going through, I want you to take a deep breath, fuck it, take 5 deep breaths. In through your nose and out through your mouth. Relax. Remain calm. You can do this. Life will go on and you need to be around to see what happens next, okay?
It’s the first draft. Use the word “suddenly.” Put as many dialogue tags and adverbs as you want. Say “he saw” “she remembered” “she felt” “they wondered” as many times as you need to. Put the em dash there, put in too many commas, use semi-colons with reckless abandon. Type in [whatever] instead of thinking up a title for something. Just write it. If you worry too much about the particulars, about all the advice posts you’ve seen saying whatever you’re doing is wrong or not good enough, you won’t get anything done. It will slow you down as you go back and try to reword what you just wrote to make it better, proper. The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done. And when you get to the end, you’ll find that all those “mistakes” are just clues for your future self to put together to make it all better.
Putting in adverbs and certain dialogue tags are a note for you as to who is saying something and how they’re saying it. When you’re editing, you can make sure it shows through the story instead. The word “suddenly” is a reminder to make things more abrupt. The first draft is just you mapping out where you want to go and how you want to get there. Don’t waste time trying to get it 100% right now, because then it will never get done. Don’t think too much– just write. Save the thinking for editing later.
The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done
