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1-MONTH BOOKS: HOW TO WRITE YOUR FIRST DRAFT IN ONE MONTH
Completion Is the Goal, Not Perfection
Chapter One — Part 5
Let’s clear something up right now: your goal this month is not to write a perfect book. Your goal is to finish a first draft.
That may sound obvious, but it’s where most aspiring authors get stuck.
They start writing, then they stop to rewrite. They overthink the opening sentence. They wonder if their idea is clear enough. They get caught in the loop of self-editing — fixing every word as they go — and never gain momentum.
This is what perfectionism does. It dresses up as high standards, but underneath, it’s fear in disguise. Fear of failure. Fear of judgment. Fear of not being “good enough.”
But here’s the truth: you can’t edit a blank page. And you can’t improve what doesn’t exist. The only way to finish your book is to write it all the way through — messy, raw, and incomplete. That’s what a first draft is supposed to be.
No one gets it right on the first try. Even bestselling authors write terrible first drafts. They know the secret: the magic is in the revision, not the creation. But before you can revise anything, you need words on the page. You need a finished draft.
