Stop Overthinking—Your First Draft Isn’t Supposed to Be Good

Overthinking kills creativity. If you want to build a regular writing practice, you need to be able to write first, and fix it later.

Every writer has been there… staring at a blank page, waiting for the “right” words to come. You type a sentence, delete it, type another, tweak it endlessly. Before you know it, an hour has passed, and you’ve written nothing worth keeping.

That’s the trap of overthinking.

First drafts are not supposed to be polished. They exist to get the raw ideas down. The real magic happens in revision, but you can’t revise a blank page. So why are you still trying to perfect every sentence as you go?

Quick Tip: Give Yourself Permission to Write Badly

• First drafts are discovery. They’re where you figure out what you actually want to say.

• Messy pages can be edited. Empty pages can’t.

• You’ll never get to a great sentence if you don’t first write an okay one.

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