The point of the first draft isn’t to create anything good.

It’s to put as much as possible down; to vomit your thoughts onto a page. If it’s messy or unglamorous, you’re on the right track.

The good work begins on the second edit, and the third, and the fourth, until you end up with something decent. That means the first draft really isn’t that important. The faster you get it over and done with, the better.

When I first started writing, I would get overwhelmed at the blank text editor. My hands would freeze up, for fear of writing something appalling. But the more I’ve written, the more I realise that the faster I burn through the first draft, the faster better work comes.

As Neil Gaiman said in his Masterclass:

“Write down everything that happens in the story, and then in your second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”