… only great re-writers.
The sooner you accept that your first drafts will be steaming piles of squishy word vomit, the sooner you will be able to write the story you want to write.
First drafts are nasty. They are disgusting. They make you want to curl up in a pillow fort and swear off writing forever.
Rough drafts weed out the weak.
The rough draft is the first test of a writer. If you can’t get through this, you won’t get through the rejections, one-star reviews, and sleepless nights lost in a jungle of your own musings.
Get the rough draft done. Do whatever it takes. Turn off the internet. Give yourself bribes. Make your friends offer up bribes or threats as needed, and get that first draft done.
And then edit it. The first edit through you’ll fix the basic problems. Fix a comma, correct a typo, highlight a plot hole. You’ll see a monster and it will scare you. Your own imperfections will stare back at you from that rough draft, and you will need to battle your own demons to survive.
If you need to, call in reinforcements. Get a beta reader to go over it and makes notes. You might not even use the notes, but knowing you aren’t going into this dark undergrowth of the mind alone will give you the courage to survive.
Then, pick a page, any page, and start reading.
Word by word. Sentence by sentence. Paragraph by paragraph. Read the story and add the pieces you forgot. They’ll appear as you read. They’ve always belonged there, you just forgot them for a moment while you wrote that first draft. So now you put them back in.
You’ll shuffle a few things around.
Then start reading from the top again. You’ll see the themes now, the character arcs, the fears and needs and promises hidden between the ink stains on the page. You’ll add a word here or a paragraph there, rewriting the book.
And then you’ll step back and see the whole thing revealed as if by magic.
There is the story you wanted to tell. That is what no first draft could ever say. But you’ve found it, because you are a great rewriter.