I have a confession to make. I am incredibly good at starting things. Finishing them? That has always been a different story.
My biggest obstacle has always been the urge to perfect the work before it even exists. I would write a chapter, immediately go back to tweak a sentence, fix a paragraph, and suddenly find myself three chapters deep in edits without having moved the actual story forward. I was editing instead of writing.
That is why I am currently experimenting with a method called Fast Drafting, developed by author Jessica Brody. The core philosophy is wonderfully simple: the first job is to finish the story. Making it good comes later.
The approach is built around three simple rules:
Keep Moving Forward: Get the story out of your head and onto the page without looking back.
Take Notes, Don’t Edit: When you spot something that needs fixing, jot it down for later rather than stopping to fix it immediately.
Embrace the Clunkiness: Give yourself permission to write terrible dialogue, flat descriptions, and imperfect scenes.
There is something incredibly liberating about this process. It means the sentence I just wrote doesn’t have to be brilliant. It just has to exist. After all, you can always fix a bad page—but you can never fix a blank one.