Well, we made it! It’s 2021. 2020 is now officially “history.” And I don’t know about you but 2020 felt like a very messy first draft to me. Full of false starts, random plot twists that made no sense, a hard-to-follow narrative, and very poor pacing.

But although we can’t revise that mess, we can certainly revise the first drafts of our novels and stories and make them shine. So, to kickstart 2021, I’m compiling my list of 5 common first draft problems and how to fix them. For this list, I’m skipping the structural issues and focusing more on the physical writing. If you’d like more of a structure checklist, this blog post should give you a good start!

Now keep in mind, these 5 problems are not things that only newbie writers find in their first drafts. These are problems that nearly all writers are susceptible to. So take comfort. If you’re finding your first draft suffers from many of the items on this list, you are not alone.