What’s the easiest way to create a first draft?
· The StoryProp team
The honest answer is that the easiest first draft is the one you don’t have to write in sentences. Most of the difficulty people attribute to writing is not composition at all. It is the demand that thought arrive already dressed — subject, verb, rhythm, transition — at the exact moment the thought is least formed. That demand is expensive, and it is optional.
Everything below is a way of lowering the entry cost. None of it makes the book easier. It makes the beginning easier, which is a different and more useful promise. You will still revise. What you gain is material to revise, which is the only thing revision cannot manufacture on its own.
Talk it out and let the talking be the draft
You already know how to explain your story. If a friend asked what happens in chapter four, you would tell them, fluently, in a minute or two, with the good parts emphasized and the boring parts skipped. That explanation is a draft. It is a bad draft in the sense that its sentences are loose and its transitions are conversational, and it is an excellent draft in the sense that it exists, it has a shape, and it knows what matters.
So talk. Dictate into your phone on a walk. Talk while doing the dishes, which is better than it sounds, because the hands being busy seems to release the part of the brain that otherwise stands over your shoulder editing. The rule is that you do not stop to fix anything. If you say the wrong name, keep going. If you contradict yourself, say the contradiction out loud and keep going — the contradiction is information, and you will want it later.
Transcribed speech is not prose, and it is a mistake to pretend otherwise. What comes back will be repetitive, full of false starts, and structurally strange — you will circle a moment three times before landing on it. But it will also contain, reliably, two things that are hard to produce by staring at a blank page: the actual order in which you think the story happens, and the sentences you say when you are not performing. Those second ones are often the best lines in the eventual chapter. You wrote them without noticing, which is precisely why they’re good.
The other version of talking it out is conversation, where something asks and you answer, and the answering accumulates into prose. This works for the same reason: a question is smaller than a blank page, and answering is a familiar motion. The risk is that you talk yourself into agreement with whatever the other side proposed. Keep the questions open — not “should Mara confront him,” which invites a yes, but “what is Mara actually protecting by not confronting him,” which forces you to say something only you know.
Interview yourself, badly and on purpose
If you don’t have anyone to talk to and dictation feels self-conscious, be both chairs. Write a list of questions about the scene you can’t start, then answer them in whatever register comes out. The questions should be dumb — dumber than you think is dignified. Who is in the room. What do they want in the next four minutes, not in the novel. What is the piece of furniture nobody mentions. What would have to happen for this scene to end early, and why doesn’t it.
Here is what makes this work: an answer is allowed to be a fragment. Nobody expects an interview to have topic sentences. So you write “kitchen, late, she hasn’t taken her coat off” and that is a complete and successful act of writing, whereas “The kitchen was late and she had not taken off her coat” would be a sentence you’d immediately want to delete. The fragment survives because you never asked it to be good. Answer fifteen questions this way and you will find you have written the scene sideways — the description is in there, the blocking is in there, and the line you were afraid to write usually shows up late in the list, once you’ve stopped guarding.
Scaffold sentences: say what it says before you make it say it
The single cheapest trick I know is to write the sentence that describes the paragraph instead of the paragraph. Literally type: “What this chapter says is that Daniel has decided to stay and hasn’t told anyone, including himself.” Then: “What this scene has to establish is that the house is not neutral — it has opinions about who belongs in it.” Then: “What I want the reader to feel here is mild dread about a chipped cup, which is ridiculous, and that’s the point.”
These are not placeholders in the sense of empty boxes. They are the argument of the chapter, stated plainly, which is the thing most first drafts are groping toward and rarely articulate. Once the argument is on the page, the prose has a job. You are no longer inventing and expressing at the same time — a doubling that accounts for most of the pain.
The scaffold sentences mostly come out during revision. Sometimes one survives, softened, as the chapter’s spine; more often you delete it and find the paragraph beneath it has organized itself around the shape it left. A related move is to write the chapter as stage directions. “She comes in. He doesn’t look up. She puts the cup down harder than she meant to. Neither mentions it. He asks about the car.” Five lines, no craft required, and now the scene is blocked. Turning blocking into prose is a task with a known procedure. Inventing a scene from nothing is not.
Make the unit small enough that refusing feels silly
Resistance scales with the size of what you’re contemplating. “Write chapter four” is large enough to be worth avoiding. “Write the first thing Mara notices when she walks in” is not — refusing it would be absurd, and the absurdity is doing the work. You are not tricking yourself, exactly. You are choosing a unit your reluctance doesn’t recognize as a threat.
Good small units: one line of dialogue and the response. The physical thing a character does with their hands. One sentence of weather that is actually about mood. The last line of the scene, written first, so the rest has somewhere to go. A single paragraph of a character explaining, to nobody, why they were right.
The trap is treating small units as a permanent method. They get you in the door on a bad morning; they are not a way to build a novel, because a book made of two hundred beautiful fragments is a book you will still have to assemble. Use them to start. When the momentum arrives — and it tends to arrive sooner than you expect, which is the whole reason the trick works — let the unit grow.
The easy draft is a beginning, not a book
Everything above produces material that is loose, over-explained, and structurally provisional. That is the deal. A dictated chapter says the same thing three ways. An interview draft is missing its connective tissue. Scaffold sentences sit on the page in plain view, announcing themselves. None of this is a finished chapter, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with a long manuscript they can’t face.
So plan the second pass as part of the method, not as a punishment. Read the loose draft once without touching it and mark only the sentences that surprised you — those are the real ones, and they usually cluster in the parts you were least deliberate about. Cut the three redundant approaches to a moment down to the one that landed. Take the scaffold sentence out and see whether the paragraph stands. Where you contradicted yourself out loud, decide which version is true now, and write the decision down somewhere it will outlast your memory of making it.
That last step matters more than it looks. Easy drafting generates decisions at speed — you name a sister, you give a house a history, you commit to a season — and speed is exactly the condition under which decisions get lost. A method that lowers the cost of starting has to be paired with something that keeps track, or the third chapter quietly disagrees with the first. That is what a project with a memory is for: StoryProp turns what you’ve settled into records the drafting reads before it writes, so a fast pass doesn’t become an inconsistency you find in month four.
Two neighbors to this post, briefly. If you are already drafting steadily and want to move faster through a book you’ve committed to, that is a question about pace and stamina rather than entry, and it lives in how to finish a first draft fast. If you don’t yet have a story to talk about — if the blankness is upstream of the page — start at I want to write a book but don’t know where to begin instead. Easy entry assumes there is something to enter.
The measure of a first draft is not whether it is good. It is whether it gives revision something to hold. Talk it out, answer your own dumb questions, say what the chapter says before you make it say it, and keep the unit small until it doesn’t need to be. What you’ll have at the end of the week is rough and real, and rough and real is the only material anyone has ever made a book out of.
If dictation and scaffold sentences get the loose version out, the next problem is the second pass — cutting the three redundant approaches to a moment down to the one that landed, without disturbing the lines you were right about. StoryProp drafts in pieces and revises what you point at, leaving the rest alone, and keeps every pass so you can compare two versions or restore one.