#first draft advice

(a non-suffering writer’s guide to structure, sanity, and staying mildly hydrated)

Hey besties. Let’s talk outlines. Specifically: how to do them without crawling into the floorboards and screaming like a Victorian ghost.

If just hearing the word “outline” sends your brain into chaos-mode, welcome. You’re not broken, you’re just a writer whose process has been hijacked by Very Serious Advice™ that doesn’t fit you. You don’t need to build a military-grade beat sheet. You don’t need a sixteen-tab spreadsheet. You don’t need to suffer to be legitimate. You just need a structure that feels like it’s helping you, not haunting you.

So. Here’s how to outline your book without losing your soul (or all your serotonin).

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🍓 1. Stop thinking of it as “outlining.” That word is cursed. Try “story sketch.” “Narrative roadmap.” “Planning soup.” Whatever gets your brain to chill out. The goal here is to understand your story, not architect it to death.

Outlining isn’t predicting everything. It’s just building a scaffold so your plot doesn't fall over mid-draft.

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🧠 2. Find your plot skeleton. There are lots of plot structures floating around: 3-Act. Save the Cat. Hero’s Journey. Take what helps, ignore the rest.

If all else fails, try this dirt-simple one I use when my brain is mush:

Act I: What’s the problem?

Act II: Why can’t we fix it?

Act III: What finally makes us change?

Ending: What does that change cost?

You don’t need to fill in every detail. You just need to know what’s driving your character, what’s blocking them, and what choices will change them.

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🛒 3. Make a “scene bucket list.” Before you start plotting in order, write down a list of scenes you know you want: key vibes, emotional beats, dramatic reveals, whatever.

These are your anchors. Even if you don’t know where they go yet, they’re proof your story already exists, it just needs connecting tissue.

Bonus: when you inevitably get stuck later, one of these might be the scene that pulls you back in.

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🧩 4. Start with 5 key scenes. That’s it. Here’s a minimalist approach that won’t kill your momentum:

Opening (what sucks about their world?)

Catalyst (what throws them off course?)

Midpoint (what makes them confront themselves?)

Climax (what breaks or remakes them?)

Ending (what’s changed?)

Plot the spaces between those after you’ve nailed these. Think of it like nailing down corners of a poster before smoothing the rest.

You’re not “doing it wrong” if you start messy. A messy start is a start.

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🔧 5. Use the outline to ask questions, not just answer them. Every section of your outline should provoke a question that the scene must answer.

Instead of: — “Chapter 5: Sarah finds a journal.”

Try: — “Chapter 5: What truth does Sarah find that complicates her next move?”

This makes your story active, not just a list of stuff that happens. Outlines aren’t just there to record, they’re tools for curiosity.

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🪤 6. Beware of the Perfectionist Trap™. You will not get the entire plot perfect before you write. Don’t stall your momentum waiting for a divine lightning bolt of Clarity. You get clarity by writing.

Think of your outline as a map drawn in pencil, not ink. It’s allowed to evolve. It should evolve.

You’re not building a museum exhibit. You’re making a prototype.

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🧼 7. Clean up after you start drafting. Here’s the secret: the first draft will teach you what the story’s actually about. You can go back and revise the outline to fit that. It’s not wasted work, it’s evolving scaffolding.

You don’t have to build the house before you live in it. You can live in the mess while you figure out where the kitchen goes.

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🛟 8. If you’re a discovery writer, hybrid it. A lot of “pantsers” aren’t anti-outline, they’re just anti-stiff-outline. That’s fair.

Try using “signposts,” not full scenes:

Here’s a secret someone’s hiding.

Here’s the emotional breakdown scene.

Here’s a betrayal. Maybe not sure by who yet.

Let the plot breathe. Let the characters argue with your outline. That tension is where the fun happens.

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🪴 TL;DR but emotionally: You don’t need a flawless outline to write a good book. You just need a loose net of ideas, a couple of emotional anchors, and the willingness to pivot when your story teaches you something new.

Outlines should support you, not suffocate you.

Let yourself try. Let it be imperfect. That’s where the good stuff lives.

Go forth and outline like a gently chaotic legend 🧃

— written with snacks in hand by Rin T. @ thewriteadviceforwriters 🍓🧠✍️

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

I’ve seen a lot of advice posts that encourage writing a “bad” first draft, or saying that the point of the first draft isn’t to be “good” just to be done, but I have yet to see any examples of what that actually means (which is unfortunate because for a lot of first-time writers that may just mean that their best effort on a first draft isn’t “good enough”), so that’s what I’m here for! The ultimate advocate of ugly writing, babey! Let’s write some “bad” first drafts!!

Forewarning that this is going to be difficult for you perfectionists out there (same hat tho!!!), but really, if you’re looking to finish a first draft within a reasonable time frame (and not continue to rewrite the beginning 50 times to get there, only to be disappointed when the next scenes aren’t as “good” as the beginning), then this really is the way to go. Perfectionism comes in super handy in later drafts, but it’s a real burden in the first draft, and I really really relate to that. What I find that helps keep my perfectionism in check while I’m drafting is to keep a separate Word doc open (or a notebook and pen at hand) to jot down new ideas or things that have changed throughout the draft. Putting a page number down next to the notation will save your life as well. Your future self will thank you!

Okay, so let’s get into it! You have an idea, and you need to get that first draft out before you lose motivation or move on to a shiny new WIP idea. What’s that first draft going to look like?

Write the scenes you’re excited about first. If you’re someone who, like myself, needs to write things in chronological order, then write these scenes in chronological order - but! if you have the conclusion figured out, then write it now, yes, even before that one bit in the middle you’re not sure about. Is it likely that some details in these scenes will change as you keep writing different parts of the book? Yes! Do it anyway! Anything you write will be helpful for later drafts, so write those scenes!!! Plus, if you start with what you’re excited about, you’ll want to keep writing even after they’re finished, because your brain will just keep generating other super cool ideas for those in-between scenes. And yeah, there will definitely be filler scenes to write, but you can probably worry about those in the next draft.

If you’re on a roll, don’t worry about punctuation, grammar, or spelling. I mean it! If those red squiggles in Word bother you, turn them off (they’re really only semi-helpful for editing, and we’re not doing that right now). If you write faster and think better using “internet grammar” (minimal/excessive punctuation, no capitalization, weird spelling, etc.), then do that! If it helps you get words on the page, it’s worth doing.

If you’re not on a roll, try putting some space between what you’ve written and what you need to write. For me, that frequently means hitting enter (even mid-sentence if I suddenly get stuck), typing “monkey,” and then hitting enter again, as many times as it takes for my brain to reboot and remember what the hell I was going for. If that means I have a chain of 20 monkeys in the middle of a paragraph, so be it. They get to hang out there until I come back in draft two and delete them. 

I’ve also written “uhhhhhh” and “oh fuck now what” several times in a first draft. It happens. It’s easier to write in a way that mirrors your thought process, so just do what works. Use memes in your prose to keep it moving - it’ll make future you laugh when you go back through on draft two!

Don’t be afraid to change major pieces of plot - but don’t you dare go back and rewrite earlier pieces to match! Let’s say you’re at the end of act one and you revealed some tragic detail about your MC’s backstory, but now you’re in the middle of act two and you’ve realized that it no longer fits your idea of MC and you no longer want it to be true. Simply make a brief note of it and keep writing like that scene in act one never happened. Deleting, rewriting, and repurposing are all for later drafts! The goal on the first draft is literally just to reach the end - and it’s inevitable that you’ll find and change the story along the way.

Forget about foreshadowing. No matter how detailed of an outliner you are, the fact is that in the first draft you really don’t actually know what’s going to happen yet in your book (see point 5). So forget about trying to foreshadow. Spell out what’s happening plain as day - because the first draft is just one long exposition dump to aide you in future drafts. If you get halfway through and a sudden twist or weird piece of backstory jumps out at you, write it in as if you had foreshadowed, even though you haven’t yet. Make a note of it, and maybe even note where you could foreshadow this in the next few drafts, but keep moving forward. 

Changing perspectives is fine even if it goes against how you know you want your final draft to be. If you have a scene in mind that you know you need to include, but you have no idea how MC would react during it, but you know how your side character would react, write the scene from the side character’s perspective. You can think about MC’s POV in that scene later - again, the point is just to get it written, so if switching POVs gets you through the scene, do it.

Ultimately, this is what people mean when they say your first draft is going to be “ugly.” It’s going to be a little (or a lot) messy. But that’s okay. The struggle of the beginning writer is realizing that your first draft is not going to look like anything you’ve read before - because those are final drafts. And to the gifted writers who breezed through school (like I did) by submitting their first draft essays for grading - that’s not going to work here. Every time you rewrite a piece, it gets better. If you try to make your first draft perfect, you will just end up frustrated and disappointed at the time you wasted, because you’ll end up reworking 80% of it or more in the subsequent drafts. Your writing style will change and improve, and your knowledge will grow, and every time you revisit a draft, that will be reflected.

So write that ugly draft. Insert so many author’s notes mid-paragraph that you look like an early 2000s fanfic writer. Contradict previous scenes like you’re constructing the most elaborate Winchester Mystery House -esque draft the world has ever seen, complete with paragraphs that lead to nowhere and mysterious monkey chains cutting sentences in half. 

You can tell when a book was written by vibes and TVTropes alone.

It’s got: ☑️ the reluctant chosen one ☑️ the love triangle ☑️ the mysterious brooding boy™ ☑️ the sassy best friend ☑️ the dead parents ☑️ the villain with daddy issues ☑️ the scene where someone says “you don’t know what I’m capable of” and walks away dramatically

And like… that’s fine.

Tropes are tools. But here’s the thing: they are starting points, not story goals.

If your plot reads like it was drafted by a checklist in a Pinterest caption, it might be time to recalibrate. Here's how to actually use tropes without turning your book into a YA Mad Libs generator:

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🧩 Tropes Are Patterns--Not Presets

A trope is a pattern, not a requirement. It’s not a law. It’s not a plug-and-play feature. And it’s definitely not your plot.

The “enemies-to-lovers” arc? That’s a container. What you put inside it, that’s where the originality lives.

The goal isn’t to avoid tropes. It’s to do something interesting with them.

→ Why are they enemies? → What does the “love” cost them? → What happens if they fail to become lovers?

Tropes don’t carry the story. The conflict does.

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⚔️ Complicate the Familiar

Here’s a trick: if a trope feels too easy, break it in half.

Examples: → “Reluctant chosen one” → okay, but what if they wanted it, and then hated it once they got it? → “The mentor dies” → cool, but what if the mentor fakes their death to manipulate the protagonist? → “Sassy best friend” → no. Make them real. Give them pain. Give them depth. No more walking punchlines.

Tropes are scaffolding, not shortcuts. Add weight. Add doubt. Add betrayal.

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🕳️ Interrogate Why You’re Using It

Ask yourself: → Do I love this trope or do I feel like I have to include it? → Am I doing this because I’ve seen it done… or because it serves my story? → Is this trope the only interesting thing about this scene?

If your answer is “because that’s what YA stories do,” delete it. Go deeper.

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💔 Tropes Aren’t Substitutes for Character Arcs

You can’t use “grumpy x sunshine” and call it development. Tropes are flavors, not meals.

Give us: → Choices with consequences. → Conflicting values. → Character growth that costs something.

Otherwise? Your grumpy guy is just a Pinterest moodboard with a pulse.

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🧨 Use Reader Expectations Against Them

You want to use a trope and not make it predictable? Weaponize it.

Example: → Start with a love triangle. Let the MC fall hard. Then have both love interests realize they’re in love with each other. → Use the “chosen one” trope… but make it about dismantling that myth entirely. → Introduce the “villain redemption arc” and let them choose to stay bad because it makes more sense for them.

Set up the pattern. Then snap it in half. That’s how you surprise a jaded reader.

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Final thoughts from your local trope goblin:

→ Tropes aren’t the problem. It’s treating them like a checklist instead of a narrative engine. → A good trope doesn’t make your story good. How you twist it does. → If a story reads like it was built from Tumblr quotes and nothing else—it’s gonna flop.

So go ahead. Use the trope. Then ruin it. Make it weird. Make it hurt. Make it yours.

—rin t. // story mechanic. trope thief. YA bingo card burner. // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:

It may seem paradoxical of me to be writing this post from the depths of revision #832-B in my current project, but the fact I would quote such a number, even in hyperbole, should convey something in and of itself about the mutability of a story and how frivolous it is to try to get anything right the first time.

There are two major reasons it is useful, even necessary to write the most horrible…