Whether you’ve been writing for five minutes or fifty years, first drafts are hard. They rarely resemble the perfect story your imagination wants, and too often, the gulf between the goal and the reality causes writers to give up. More than two dozen books into my publishing career, I still struggle with first drafts. But I have learned some techniques to trick the voices of negativity in my head. Maybe they will help you too.

1) Remember who your real audience is.

The audience for your final book is your readers. But for a first draft, your real audience is simply…you. Future You, who will somehow take this vaguely book-shaped mess you are creating and turn it, draft by draft, into a real book.

Present You has only one responsibility: assemble the ingredients that Future You will need. Future You will have all kinds of perspectives and ideas on how to fix your story, thanks to the hard work that Present You is doing right now to assemble the raw ingredients.

Future You will bake the cake. All Present You has to worry about is measuring out the flour and sugar.

2) Create writing prompts for tough scenes.

When starting my current manuscript, I spent several days outlining and working on character backstories. But when it came time to write the first scene, I froze. The pressure of Starting a Book was too much, even if the only audience was Future Me.

So I took the pressure off by making it a writing prompt, not the beginning of my novel. I took what I knew about the scene and wrote a prompt for myself: “A recent library school grad obsessed with innovation interviews at a conservative public library.”

So when I sat down to write, it wasn’t my story, in my mind. It was a scene like my story. You know, just a writing exercise. Totally low stakes.

And guess what? It got me writing again.

3) Break it down to the smallest bits.

I’m a big fan of the headings feature in Microsoft Word. I use it to break down my story into Save the Cat story beats. And when I get stuck on a scene where I know a bunch of stuff has to happen, but I don’t know exactly where or in what order, I make a list of headings, and then write each bit. First heading: my protagonist texts with her friends. Second heading: she has a conversation with her boss. Third heading: she fumes about her annoying coworker. It’s not in the right order and none of it is connected yet. But the ingredients are there, and Future Me will figure out what to do with them.

4) Change the definition of success.

I owe a lot to Jessica Brody’s Fast Drafting class for helping me learn about a forward-forward-forward mindset when it comes first drafts. (Seriously, I cannot recommend this course enough. Her Fast Draft Tracker spreadsheet alone is worth the cost.) It’s also helped me understand my own habits and what motivates me at each stage. When I am drafting, getting words on the page makes me feel like a superstar. So I track how many words are in the document—and report it to my accountability buddy after each writing session (shout out to author/illustrator Sarah McDavis!) so we can celebrate.

I tend to overwrite, though, so later, when I am editing, the thing that spurs me on is how many words I have cut that day.

I used to only count actual scenes as “words written” when drafting. But then I realized: it’s an arbitrary marker that makes me feel accomplished and encourages me to keep going, so use it! Now, when I am drafting, I count every single word I added to that document, whether it was an outline or a note or dialogue or description. And here’s the key: I don’t delete any notes after drafting the scene. I leave them in the document, so I still get credit for all that hard work.

Then, when I am editing, I will have so many words to remove! Think how accomplished I will feel once my measure of progress is removing words!

5) Skip it.

When you get to a part of your story where you have no idea what happens, just make some notes about what you do know, and move right along. For my last novel, a young adult fantasy, I got stuck about halfway through. So I just started telling myself the story and wrote it down that way—sprawling notes, dialogue here and there, but nothing resembling full scenes. And I skipped over some scenes entirely.

When I pulled that manuscript out to try for a second draft, I dreaded the mess I would find—only to see that, hey, there were a bunch of extremely usable raw ingredients there, and with the perspective of time, I knew what to do with them! That turned out to be the quickest book I ever finished, largely because I leaned into the mess and didn’t waste time writing a whole bunch of scenes that would later get chopped.

6) Take a break.

Sometimes it’s just not happening, and your mind and your body and your story are all telling you to step away for awhile. It can feel impossible, I know. I used to worry that if I stopped, I would never write again. I would lose my momentum. But when you are truly stuck in the doldrums, time away can be the best thing for Present You, Future You, and your story. Remember, there’s a reason you wanted to write that story. There is something in you that pushes you forward, and it won’t fizzle out just because you take a break. Trust yourself and your voice and give yourself the time you need to love your story again.

What are your favorite techniques for getting unstuck?