Writing with Elfie - The First Draft

I know I know, I haven't written on this blog in 100 million years. I was busy. Plus I forgor. It's hard to keep all the ducks in a row when so much of your life is changing. But I do have plans for this, and I'm going to share those plans right now. I'm thinking of making this a Blog about my writing, rather than a blog for advertising it. That's why all the previous posts are gone now, because I'm trying to refocus it all while also maintaining myself. My health, my home, my lovely cat Lola, my relationships, my mental health, my fanfics, and my aspiring professional writing. It's a lot.

But the plan, such that it is, is to write a post approximately every week and focus on my experiences in writing. I have absolutely no idea to what end, maybe this will be helpful for other hopeful beginner writers out there, maybe not. But I think it'll be fun, and maybe we can all learn something along the way.

Fans, subscribers, and haters in kind; it is entirely possible that I will write about you here, please don't take offense or take it personally. It's all part of the process, and I want to share that process with the masses, however small said masses may be. So, with all of that out of the way, let's get to it.

So, What's Up?

The past couple of months have been really hard, like really really hard. Hard to the point of wondering just what the hell life is doing here. There's been nothing so dramatic as another divorce or a stalker taking down all my socials and website (RIP OG website, you were a real one). It's been a lot of minor things. A lot of body issues and health stuff and remembering to eat and cook right while also exercising while also keeping on top of all my medicine while also managing my chronic body pain. Summer is certainly my least favorite season, and it's fast approaching with all of its hateful wrath. I don't like the heat, I am a husky dog made human. I need the snow and the cold to function, my motto is you can always put on more layers if you're cold, but you can't peel off your skin.

The daylight has been killer as well. I have my own place now, and they're just so happens to be a skylight, directly over my bed. This seemed like a good idea when I moved in in October, it is no longer a good idea. It's still bright out at nine fucking pm. It's obscene, a scandal against my sensitive sleeping schedule. So I've been overtired, overheated, and despite all that. Still writing up a damned storm.

Writing and all That

Those who know me know that I aim to write or edit 2,000 words a day. Those who know me also know that I have a subscribe star, I imagine that's where most of you readers come from actually. Hi substar people, I reallllllly appreciate you folks. But let's actually talk about writing because I've been doing an absolute fuckload of that this year. I started off strong, publishing a full novella-length Owl House fanfic on AO3 in January; then a full novella-length TLT fanfic in February. April was supposed to be the next arc of The Last Princess, an ongoing dark Gothic post-post apocalyptic fanfic I've been writing for a few years. May? A redo/remaster of my ABO TOH series. June? A TLT story set in a Victorian Era styled AU.

July was supposed to be a sort of scientist Luz lost on a primal alien world story...

"But Elfie", I hear you typing, "what about March? Where ARE all these fanfics?? I don't see them here on your AO3." Yeah... So the March one was obviously supposed to be done in February, so I could post it in March. It is now June, and I'm still working on it. So I went a little too hard, and that's essentially what I wanted to talk about with y'all today. Pacing yourself. I know it's exciting to get ambitious, it's exciting to challenge yourself, to really push how far you can go and see what can come of it. But you really need to be careful, much like training for or running a marathon, you need to pace yourself. Otherwise you're going to cause an injury, tear your ACL so to speak.

I haven't even started talking about Blood and Roses yet, that's my novel btw, the draft and initial edits are done and I'm just polishing it. That is to say, I'm polishing it when I'm not trying to catch up on my fanfiction or writing commissions for my subscribers. Or working out, or reading, or going to fencing, because I started fencing and it's really really really really really really fun and I really really really really really really really like it. A lot. I feel like a swashbuckler in the best way, even when I lose constantly to the better students.

It's been tough keeping up, and the backlog of things I need to post keeps growing. To the point where I could take a break for like 8 months and probably have content queued up no sweat. The problem is I love writing, it's fun, it's satisfying, and I want to do more. More I say!!! Video games are fun, but they aren't writing. Movies are cool, but what about writing Enemies to Lovers? It calls to me, the siren's song I can never shake. It lures me to the water's edge and drags me down into it's inky black abyss.

A big drag this past month has been a massive commission I took on. And to the client, if you're reading this, don't sweat it dude. I said yes, you paid, the contract was wrought. This is not me complaining about you, it's me learning a lesson about my writing process. You don't think 10,000 words is a lot until you consider that it's, based on my daily writing goal, five days worth of drafting, and another five of editing. That's 10 goddess damned business days in a month that only has 21. That's a lot of fuckin' writing bruh. And it's been daunting, and draining, and it's made it difficult to finish my other obligations, which means I can't work on I'll Always Be By Your Side (The march fanfic), or B&R. It's not a nice feeling, and I've learned some important lessons from it. I hope you learn them too.

The lesson is to not bite off more than you can chew, don't take such a big commission that attempting to finish it feels impossible so you don't start. Don't overextend yourself, make sure you leave enough time and space and energy for you to work on personal things. Be that writing or gardening or whatever. It's tempting to go balls to the wall, to do a full send and become a writing legend overnight. But burnout is the vicious killer of creativity, and rest is the silver sword to slay it.

With that commission out of the way, I'm hopeful I can finish the rest of this month's obligations this weekend. Which I realize it's antithetical to what I just said, but fuck it we ball. I want to write about ghost girls being in love and polish a story about a gayass disaster vampire hunter bumbling her way into a pretty vampire's arms. I realize that this post is very rambly, however I'm not going to edit it because I don't want to. Editing is the bane of my existence and I hate it. You see, editing killed my father, and I have sworn vengeance upon it. Not really, but I... I just don't like it.

With all that in mind, I hope you enjoyed the first new post of this new direction for the blog. Leave a comment if you want, otherwise check me out on my socials for more Elfie nonsense here.

Bluesky is mostly for art, Tumblr is SUPPOSED to be for writing but it's mostly me screaming about my Locked Tomb reread. AO3 is obviously where you can read my fanfics, and check out the substar if you appreciate my work and wanna chip in a few bucks to fuel my MTG/Tattoo addictions. I appreciate all my supporters of all kinds.

Talk to yah next week.

Hello and welcome back to Writing with Elfie. I hope you all had an excellent week, or at least a passable one; mine was pretty good. Did a lot of, get this, writing. Waow. Shock. Awe. Surprise. I don't think I'm going to put a lot of pomp at the front of this one, we're just going to get right into it. So let's just get right into this week's lesson: The First Draft.


The What?

A lot of folks probably already know what a first draft is, it's kind of written on the tin after all, but for those who don't know it's the first draft you right of a particular piece. Now this is where I imagine classically trained writers might talk about second drafts too, and how rewriting your first draft from scratch is a great way to iterate. And I don't disagree, I rewrote my entire novel once and it came out a lot nicer. But there's a bit of a catch, a snag that I imagine a lot of you struggle with in your attempts at writing.

Elfie, it's really hard to write one draft, and you expect me to write two?!

No. Not really. Hear me out. I typically don't write fanfiction like I'm write professionally, the only exceptions being commissions because those are professional in a way. Remember guys, it's just fanfiction, it does not need to be perfect. What matters is sitting down and FUCKING WRITING SOMETHING, anything at all. That's the challenge for a lot of aspiring writers, as we covered last week. So allow me to introduce you to the power of how I use first drafts:

It's okay for The First Draft to suck

What do I mean by that? It comes back around to perfect being the enemy of great, if I wade in the weeds trying to make a piece of writing perfect on the first try for too long, I often get paralyzed, demotivated, and I don't get any words down for quite a while. Therefore, when you do sit down to write, just start writing any words that come to mind. Get the vague general direction of your idea down on paper or the screen as soon as you can; and here's the trick, the hot tip for you all to work on this week; once you have the word vomit down...

Then we can make it great.

This trick ties into last week's, even if the sentences you right don't make any fucking sense write them down anyway. Even if all you write is: 'Luz walked to the store. She was big sad. Eda wasn't there yet, so she started opening.' that's great, because now we have something to work with instead of blank empty screens. Now it's easier to build off that basic scaffold. So, 'Luz walked into the crowded store, past all the knick-knacks and phoney occult items stuffed on the shelves. Eda was nowhere to be found, not in the breakroom, not in the back office, nor in the bathroom; so Luz started getting ready to open by grabbing a broom with a heavy sigh.'

Even with a very basic scaffold, it becomes WAYYYYY easier to start bolting on more detail. It's easier to change "Luz was sad." To grabbing a broom with a heavy sigh once we actually know Luz is supposed to be sad in this passage. Sort of like setting up the foundation of a house, which is really just a big block of something to hold it in place, the foundation is incredibly simple. Then we build the structure, then we put all the guts in the house, then the walls, then the fancy fixings. From building houses to writing fanfiction to making a sandwich; there's easier ways to assemble the result, and there's impossible ways.

Staring at a vacant lot isn't going to will a house into existence. You can't make a sandwich without having some base like bread (or breaded chicken) for the sandwich.

Building It Up

Creative writing is an iterative process, and what I mean by that is that you start with the basics. The general vague plot, the essentials. What needs to happen for the story to make sense. Whether the story is pure porn, or a deep and insightful examination of the futility of greed, you gotta start wth the basics. Who's doing what where? There's a couple of different ways you can do this, or rather there's a couple ways I can think to do this and I've done them all myself at various times.

I'm going to primarily cover the two I use in a bit more detail here. So let's get into it with my favorite style of first drafting, or roughing as I call it. Good old fashioned word vomit. What I typically do when I'm starting a story, as I come to it with an initial idea, and I just start writing things down. Things I want to see in the final product, essential actions. I set the scene, I place the characters in the scene, and then I just start writing what happens. As I write with the essentials in mind, I often find that the finer points just... become apparent as we go. We're writing Adora having spicy sebian lexo with Catra, and they're on the couch. So, naturally, Adora has to either pull Catra into her lap, or she has to push Catra down and climb on top of her for the sesso to occur. There, we have the next part of the scene. Let's write it.

But I hope I'm making it clear that by starting with the basic notion, and by using our buff brains, we can even start filling in the detail before we're done the first draft. The important part is just getting you writing. This is just a strategy to help you start writing. I'm just telling you the same thing as last week, again. Rough Drafts help you get moving, and creative inertia will carry you.

But I mentioned that there's another way I do this, and yeah. There is. Let's talk about it now. The other way I like to do it is with basic outlines. This is an unordered list of events that happen. Just the events, and the important things I want to be emphasized and that's it. Here's an example I have for a future project:


It's incomplete, because I'm likely not going to be able to get to this project this year, but I hope the concept makes some semblance of sense. Jot down the key points first. Then start filling in the stuff needed to reach those points, where they are, who's there, and how do they start the things? By creating the framework of the outline, it becomes easier to start filling in the rest because we know what we want to see.

I encourage people to give it a try, either way depending on how organized or not organized you are. Either jot down a quick list, or just start literally explaining what you want to see in your story in the most basic words you can. Both of these will give you guidance on what the fuck you're actually supposed to write down when you sit down to write.

An Example

I'm going to do an example in blog post, as I'm writing this bitch. Like right now, I'm writing it at 10:20 a.m. On Friday the 9th of January. So let's make a little outline together.

I don't know if you know this, but I love lumity, like a lot. I love that the relationship is front and center in the show, that they don't break up for stupid reasons like people thought they would, I love how cute they are, and so on. So let's just say I want to write a romantic one shot of them on a cute date. What do we want to see in that date? Well:

Luz picks up Amity from Blight Manor on stringbean. They're both dressed casually, but also bundled up for the cold. Luz flies Amity to the portal door, then takes her through. They drive to a nice, but casual, pizza place. They talk about things, remininisce about their time together, eat yummy food, and share a dessert like they always do. After dinner they head to Luz's place to watch a movie and cuddle under a blanket. They fuck silly style. Then they say cute lovey dovey shit and get ready for bed.

There you go, there's the entire story. That's an entire bitch right there. I'm tempted to not actually do the next step myself and make you all do it and then share your results in the comments. But I know everyone is super shy so I'll get us started at very least. Let's tackle the first scene I covered there: Luz picks up Amity from Blight Manor on Stringbean. Okay so we know who, it's Luz and Amity. We know where, Blight Manor. And we know how, on Stringbean. Now all we have to do is set the scene:

The skies of the boiling isles are reddening over Blight Manor. Amity Blight stares at big, fat, pink clouds floating lazily as she scans the sky for her girlfriend. She's standing in the growing shadow of her childhood home, tall and ornate, almost to the point of excess. The purple bushes, well trimmed and regal in their care, sway slightly in a soft, whispering breeze that betrays the coming of autumn.

Hopefully this is a useful example, and doesn't just leave you completely lost on what to write. I'm also going to slip in another tip for free, don't compare your writing to anyone else's, we're all at different parts of our journey and we all have different styles. Keep in mind I'm used to writing? I wrote nearly 700,000 words of fanfiction in 2025, so I do this a lot. If your first crack at expanding a basic sentence into a scene isn't this fancy, that's okay. Even if you just add basic detail, Amity waiting at the front door in the late afternoon, you're on the right track. Because that's the final bit of this strategy of mine. That's my secret, cap,

You can do the whole bettering process multiple times.

As many times as you please, you can even bust out at thesaurus if you want to get real fancy and learn some new words. But at the end of the day, the most important thing to remember is to actually write something, anything. If this rough draft strategy helps you do that more regularly, wonderful! If it doesn't, hopefully it gets your brain turning so you can come up with something that works for you. That's what matters, making writing easier for you to do.

Wrapping it all Up

So in summation: one way you can make actually doing some writing easier is by offloading the need for it to be good into stages. The first stage of which is roughing, or writing a first draft. The first draft does not need to be good, it does not need to be detailed, and it does not need to even really make sense. What matters is giving yourself a basic Foundation to start building more from, to outline the general shape of your piece, so you can start filling in as desired. Your outline should make it obvious what needs to be filled in, which you can then expand upon to your desired outcome. Be it extremely verbose and detailed descriptions or your favorite character saying "I cum." Wherever you want that writing to be, building it in stages makes the whole thing conceptually easier.

Write badly for your first draft, then improve what you have. Profit. It's simple, give it a try <3

Good luck out there friendos, and do some writing this weekend for me, will ya? Until next week, see ya!