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Stop, Your First Draft Is Never Going to Be Perfect

Every wrong sentence you write leads you to a good one.

Itxy Lopez
5 min readFeb 29, 2020
Photo by Rahul Pandit from Burst

One of the most intimidating parts of writing a novel is the infinite number of possibilities. You can take your story up, down, sideways, or all around.

How should my character act? What words do I use to portray this next scene? Should I use this idea or the one I had earlier? You don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer.

These struggles probably sound superfluous — but here I am, having them. Writers advise we follow the characters, but I think my protagonist is just as indecisive as I am.

Still, I didn’t want indecisiveness and confusion to stop me. I wanted to embrace it and use it to my advantage. So, I decided to write and write (and write a bit more) until I found the right words.

If you’re like me and you don’t know which direction to take your story, do what I’m doing: write everything.

Take it one sentence at a time — even if they’re terrible.

If you keep writing, you’ll find what you’re looking for eventually

What writers say is true. You need to write to get rid of all the bad to get to the good.

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Itxy Lopez
Itxy Lopez

Written by Itxy Lopez

I’m a self-discovery writer: I write as I grow, make mistakes, and learn.

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