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!
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