As you sit down to write your manuscript, you picture the gold shining vision of the final manuscript you want to create. You just want to hurry up and get to that version, the version you’ve dreamt of, but every amazing manuscript has a messy first draft.

Do: Focus on structure

Every story should have a beginning, middle, and ending. The beginning of your story should include the ‘inciting incident’ or the event that spurs on the events of the story. The middle should consist of conflicts that challenge your protagonist and raise the story’s stakes. Finally, the ending should include the climax and whether or not your protagonist gets the object of their desire (IE what their goal is to achieve throughout the story).

Instead of focusing too much on every single plot point, focus on hitting these beats and getting the story from Point A (the beginning) to Point B (the ending). In order to help one achieve this, it can help to create a brief events list. This simply involves breaking the story into that three-act structure and writing down (in one to two sentences) what happens in each section. For example, in a fantasy story maybe the ‘beginning’ involves a character finding out they have been chosen for a quest, which they accept. Then, next to that statement, write the events that lead to that conclusion for your protagonist. Who tells them about this quest? How do they take it? What makes them accept the task?

Do: Get to know the tone and characters

Rather than mastering your tone and characters on your first attempt, your goal should be to get to know both of these elements over the course of the first draft. Think of your first draft as your opportunity to figure out the tone and characters in your story rather than for either of them to feel perfectly crafted on the first try. When it comes to tone, on your first draft it will likely change drastically from beginning to end or even just scene by scene. It’s not uncommon for a writer to go into a novel with a light funny tone only to discover that the story works much better with a sardonic darker tone. Use your first draft to play around with your narrator’s voice and POV. It may give you more editing work to do later, but it will also allow you to figure out what works best.

Additionally, in terms of your characters, writing up an informative character sheet won’t allow you to get to know your characters nearly as much as actual scene work. On your character sheet, your protagonist could come across as very dry but their actual voice (once you start writing them) could sound completely different than you pictured. Furthermore, a character could end up making completely different decisions than you had thought they would make. If this is the case, let your character take the lead and see where it goes. Sometimes this won’t work and other times it can lead to the best character writing.

Don’t: Focus on language and details

Your first draft is the time to experiment with your language and details, not to meticulously focus on them and make sure they’re super consistent. One of the quickest ways to encounter writer’s block on your first draft is to get too bogged down with your language and making sure everything sounds nice. Even your favorite author has first drafts that are horrendous and sloppy… that’s kind of the point of them. Don’t be afraid to skip over areas where you’re struggling and just add a note in letting future you know what needs to happen there. Or if you’re in the writing groove and then lose your rhythm, don’t force yourself to try to mimic what you had previously been doing. Focus mainly on the story structure and leave the details for second and third draft you to handle.

Don’t: Worry about character development and plot holes

Since you’re still getting to know your characters in this draft, try not to focus too much on character development outside of the basics. You theoretically know the arc you’d like each character to have, but this initial draft is there to see if the characters will fit what you were thinking. They may make decisions that contradict the arc you had originally planned for them so just get to know them, see the choices they make, and then reorganize them into an arc on a later draft.

Plotholes are going to be plentiful on your first draft, that is just the nature of the beast. Perhaps you reach a point in the story where your protagonist is cornered and you’re not sure how to write them out of the situation. But wait, you think of a device that you could add to the story to aid the characters at this moment, but that would leave the audience scratching their heads wondering how this device appeared out of nowhere. Don’t worry about this now, you can always go back and add the device in an earlier chapter to make the moment more satisfying. Focus instead on getting your characters where they need to be, you can fix plot holes and inconsistencies later.

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Putting one of your characters through a spring cleaning writing exercise is an excellent way to practice showing rather than telling your readers character details through scene-work. For example, let’s say your character is spring cleaning and decides to get rid of an old exercise bike. Have they stopped exercising and don’t plan to begin again anytime soon? If this is the case, is your character depressed or simply not a fan of exercise. Or did they instead get a gym membership and that is preferable to them? One item and the choices they make surrounding that item can say so much about who they are and/or their current state.

Let’s say your character is cleaning out their closet. What types of clothes do they hold onto and why? Do they donate some clothes as they go through their wardrobe? What sorts of clothes do they decide to get rid of and why? Perhaps some of their clothes have holes or stains in them, where did that wear and tear come from?

Is this person’s home already fairly organized or are they finding old pieces of gum in various drawers? If it’s the latter, that could perhaps indicate that the character is going through a hard time as of late. Or maybe it can show the reader that this person is just generally messy, their home and life mimicking one another.

What does your character have that is sentimental in their home? An old note their Mom left in their lunchbox back in their Middle School days? Ticket stubs from a movie they saw with their partner years back? Half of a ‘best friends’ locket? Anything sentimental will have a story behind it and, when the character sees the object in real-time, it provides you with the opportunity to tell those stories. And, whether the character decides to hold on or let go to these items, says a lot about their level of sentimentality and/or the state of their relationship with the person about whom the memory shows.

Writing Prompt: Take a character from your manuscript or create a character for this exercise. Write about a spring cleaning day for your character. If you choose to use a character from your manuscript, choose a spring cleaning day from a significant year in your character’s life. Presume your readers know nothing about this character and give them character details solely by using the action of spring cleaning. Highlight important items and details around their home, tell the stories behind them, and use action to show how they feel about these objects.

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Simply from these details, there’s so much you can infer about this character. You can assume that they’re a neat freak, but also that it covers up a part of them that is private and closed off since they don’t have personal details or effects anywhere visible. This is emphasized further by the drawer detail, showing that they not only keep personal effects in drawers but also in boxes shows how many layers of privacy this person keeps. In addition, the bar detail gives the reader the sense that this character desires to host people, but doesn’t so they may be lonely.

Now, let’s look at another example. You walk into an apartment with carpeted floors and bookshelves lining the walls. Above and around the bookshelves you see dozens of posters for various movies, books, postcards, and paintings taped to the walls. There are notes taped to the fridge with various tasks and grocery lists. The dishes are all clean, but they’ve been left next to the sink despite the fact that they appear to already be dry. There are a few family photos taped up to the wall, but one of the apartment owner and their father appears to have fallen to the ground and hasn’t been taped back up. The carpeted floor appears to be freshly vacuumed, but the apartment owner left their Vans in the middle of the room.

Again, just with these cursory details, you learn a lot about the apartment owner. From the details about the bookshelves and posters, you learn that this person has a more artistic and whimsical personality. From the details about the dishes and the shoes you learn that this person is probably a little disorganized or at the very least not a neat freak like the previous homeowner. However, from the details about the organizational lists and floors, we can see that this person is at least making attempts to be organized, perhaps they’re in the process of trying to better themselves or kick bad habits. Finally, the detail about the fallen photo hints at a possible strained relationship with the character’s father.

Trying your hand at writing observational details like this is the ultimate test in showing rather than telling your readers details about your characters. To help you perfect your scene writing and allow you to give your readers these crucial details, here’s a writing exercise to help:

a) Start by picturing the homes and apartments of your friends and family. Write down each person’s name and specific details you noticed about their homes. Try to specifically think about what each observation could say about their character or personality.

b) Once you’ve completed this, choose a character from your book. Write a scene where your character is attempting to give a room in their house a makeover. Describe the room before the makeover, during as they may uncover things while they clean, and then afterward. Don’t be afraid to use the details you just wrote down about friends/family as inspiration for the details in this scene.

Think about specifically why your character may want to change this room. Maybe it has a lot of memories from a relationship they just ended or perhaps they feel that their life has become too messy and they want to clean in order to allow themselves to feel more organized again. Think about what the room makeover truly means for them and show it through scene details rather than by explicitly telling the reader what the character is doing.

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Examine the friendships in your own life

Writing friendships that feel real is an incredibly difficult thing to do. It’s very easy for them to feel too perfect or basic or manufactured and then they won’t be an important factor in your story. One way to begin to figure out how to make those relationships feel real is to examine your own friendships. Make a list of all of your closest friends- what’re each of their qualities that make them unique? What do they give you as a friend? What do you feel that you give them? How did you meet/decide to become friends? What are some inside jokes you have? What do each of your friends do that maybe gets on your nerves from time to time? Looking at this list will allow you to examine some very real friendships and you can pull some of these details or similar ones into your own story to make it feel more realistic.

Create the characters as individuals first

You may already know that you want these two or more characters to be best friends, but you need to work on figuring out who they are as individuals first. If you work backwards and focus on their friendship first, you risk making them too much of a perfect pair to be believable. Their characteristics shouldn’t feel perfectly catered to one another’s personalities because that’s not how life or friendship really works. It’s about two completely different people with different lives meeting and building a friendship from there. So focus on the character work first, figure out where each of these characters are from, how they grew up, what their relationships with their families are like and what their views are on the world, people, and themselves.

Establish the relationship

Now, this can go one of two ways. Either the friendship you’re establishing is a large part of the plot of the book in which case you’ll likely be introducing them to each other on the page or it’ll be an already established friendship. If you’re going with the former option, go back and look at your list of friends and your meetings. You don’t have to create this perfect meet-cute moment for the friendship to be established, simply think about how you became friends with some of your friends and create a scene that feels real and establishes their separate personalities.

If you’re going with the second option, this scenario may not even make it into your book. But write it anyways. In order to truly make the relationship feel real and established, you need to know what age they were when they met, how they became friends, and how their friendship has evolved over time up until the point where your book begins.

Give the relationship layers

What are their inside jokes? Favorite things to do together? What are their favorite qualities in one another? What do each of them do that annoys the other? Friendships are imperfect and incredibly specific things and in order for this one to feel real you need to establish all of the eccentricities that make it unique.

What is at stake for their friendship in your story?

Even if the friendship is sort of a side plot to your story, there needs to be something at stake in order for the friendship to feel purposeful and necessary to the story. You can’t just add a friend character in order to be supportive and to relay information to us about the protagonist because then the character will feel completely unnecessary. You likely already know what your story’s protagonist wants/desires throughout the story, but also think about their friend’s needs. Do they want different things? Do they want the same thing, but want to go about it differently? Are they competing for the same thing? How does this affect their friendship?

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You’ve entered a flashback, of course.

Writing flashbacks can be an incredibly difficult art. Flashbacks often become an unwelcome crutch for novice writers, serving as the sole medium through which we find out about our protagonist’s past. But, in actuality, a flashback scene is only meant to be used in extremely specific circumstances. For those struggling to find that happy balance between past and present, here are some tips to help:

1) Do you really need a flashback?

Although you, as the writer, will have very clear pictures of the various events and memories leading up to your protagonist’s present circumstances, that doesn’t always mean they should be included in your story. Novels and short stories that rely heavily on flashbacks are widely considered weak and ineffective. This is because of one of the main pitfalls of using flashbacks: the events have already happened. A strong story focuses on the present circumstances of a character and the conflict that lies in their circumstances. There is no immediate sense of urgency or suspense inherent to something that happened years prior to the present events in which the reader is invested.

Therefore, a flashback is only to be used in cases where the reader is gaining something from living out a memory that they wouldn’t be able to gain through exposition. Allow us to give a few examples. Let’s say you want to detail that your protagonist had a loving relationship with his deceased mother through the memory of them having a conversation while watching a film together. The day you’re choosing isn’t an emotional/dramatic or life-changing scene for your protagonist, it’s merely to illustrate the nature of their relationship. In this case, we recommend summarizing the events of that memory rather than jumping into a flashback.

On the other hand, when a memory is emotional or depicts a crucial moment that largely or wholly informs the person that your protagonist is in the present…this is the only case where a flashback should be used. Let’s say your protagonist once saw their sister drown in a lake at a young age. You can’t very well summarize an event or scene like this. Not only would that be jarring to read, but it wouldn’t do justice to the full emotional impact of the event and how it informs your protagonist and their decisions in the present tense.

So, when you’re considering whether a flashback is needed, ask yourself – Do the events in this memory have a huge life-long impact on my protagonist? Do they largely or wholly inform their decisions in the present tense? If your answer is ‘no,’ don’t use a flashback.

2) Focus on ‘the now’ and build suspense

As stated previously, the main focus of your novel or short story should be on the action in the present tense. Therefore, possibly the worst thing you could do is to start your story with a flashback scene. Not only will that confuse the reader as to what ‘the now’ of the story is, but they also have no context for the flashback. A flashback is meant to provide an explanation for specific character traits or flaws. You must spend time establishing your character thoroughly first, making your reader wonder why the character is a certain way, in order for the flashback to have any sort of payoff.

Writers often make the mistake of thinking the reader needs to immediately understand everything about their protagonist- their past, who they are, why they are the way they are, etc. But this isn’t the case at all. Although you should quickly establish who your character is now, your reader doesn’t immediately need to know who they were. In fact, creating a sense of suspense and mystery around your character’s past will make your pivotal flashback scenes even more effective. Though flashbacks don’t have any immediate sense of urgency, by building up to them, you create that sense of urgency that they inherently lack. A pro-tip for creating this is to pepper in little parts or flashes of the memory throughout the story leading up to the flashback. For example, let’s say the memory has something to do with a bar. Perhaps your character smells a certain kind of alcohol in the present and then hears the voice of one of their friends in their head (a friend from the memory). This will keep the reader intrigued, wondering when these scattered details will be explained.

3) Use external triggers

Transitioning in and out of a flashback is an extremely difficult art and must be handled with great care. One of the biggest mistakes writers make with these transitions is to give no context to them. These memories that the reader is witnessing can’t come out of absolutely nowhere. Like everything else in your story, they must be informed (in some way) by the present action of the story. So it must feel like we’re seeing this memory because the protagonist is reliving it.

The best way to smooth the initial transition in and out of the flashback is to use external triggers. For example, as previously stated, perhaps the protagonist smells a certain type of alcohol that transports him into his memory. Or maybe she sees a woman in a red coat that looks exactly like her sister. They need to have a reason for being sucked back in time in this very vivid sense.

And, just like they need a reason to go back, they need one to come back to the present. So perhaps a horn honking, a door slamming, or someone calling their name. Think about moments where you’ve slipped into daydreams and what external forces have pulled you back to reality.

4) Don’t confuse your readers

When you’re transitioning into a flashback, the last thing you want is for a reader to be unable to tell you’ve gone back in time. This is such a clear indication of an amateur writer and will likely lose you a lot of readers (out of pure frustration). To avoid confusion, it’s important to quickly alert your reader as to the shift in time, where we’ve shifted to, where in space we are, and who is present that matters to the story. One great example of this technique in action comes from the novel Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry:

All his old habits came back automatically. At a glance he assessed [everyone’s] posture and hands. Was there a man whose fingers curled in a little tremor when their eyes met, a woman whose hand moved to rest inside her handbag? He knew all the practical moves and involuntary gestures, and he scanned everyone, granting no exceptions. He and Eddie had done a job like this one when he was no more than twelve. Eddie had dressed him for baseball, and had even bought him a new glove to carry folded under his arm. When they had come upon the man in the crowd, he hadn’t even seen them; his eyes were too occupied in studying the crowd for danger to waste a moment on a little kid and his father walking home from a sandlot game. As they passed the man …

Another helpful transition technique that Perry utilizes here is using verb tense changes to alert the reader of the shift. The transition is easier for those who are writing their story in present tense, but for those who chose past tense conveying a shift in time back further can be more challenging. We recommend using Perry’s technique of switching from past tense to past perfect to ease the initial transition in and out of the flashback. In the present, he’s using phrases like ‘he knew’ and ‘he scanned’. But, in his initial transition, he begins using phrases like, ‘had done’ and ‘had bought’.

5) Focus on the details

It’s also important to keep in mind, when you shift to the past, that the details should change. If this is a childhood memory, your protagonist should be experiencing the scenes using clearly more infantile observation skills. If this is a drastic jump in time, include details that are relevant to the time period to which we’ve shifted. Even if you’re writing a fantasy book, you must consider how the society/world at large is different in this flashback as opposed to the present. If this flashback is depicting an event that changed the protagonist’s personality drastically, show the reader how they were different before the event occurred.

6) Keep it brief and infrequent

In the circumstances where it’s necessary to use a flashback, make sure they’re brief and only include important information. So, for example, let’s say this is the sister drowning scenario. The flashback shouldn’t begin earlier in the day with our protagonist hanging out with her sister if nothing important occurred then. Begin, instead, with the lake scene or the girls walking to the lake.

But, ultimately, we really can’t stress enough how infrequent your flashback scenes should be. Focus on the present and use these as a tool if and only if the reader witnessing the events of the flashback is crucial to understanding the protagonist and their decisions in ‘the now’ of the book. Otherwise, give your flashbacks the dreaded ax.

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