If I could give myself writing tips before I started my draft...

I'm 26 years old, and have just finished my first draft of a fantasy novel.

            

I expected to feel accomplishment with the completion of the first draft, but instead I feel like anxiety is as strong as ever. Editing is not easy, it isn't fast, and it takes just as much effort as the initial composition.

                

When I started writing my first book, I tried as hard as I could to focus on the fact that I could make whatever I wanted.

For the first few weeks, I would start drafting something, and get hooked on it. I would feel an obligation to complete the scenes, or even transform the characters and plan revisions. All the while, I hadn't even made anything more than a thousand words long. I remember saying to myself, "It's ok to make a shitty first draft. Just get anything written."

While this approach is certainly true, and critical to getting anything of substance written, I wish that I had kept some things in mind.

•              Setting is something that can be changed and modified with great ease.

I remember worrying about locations and settings and world building, long before it mattered at all. Don't mistake world building that is essential to the story with what I am describing. I literally sketched out maps of locations that I actively knew that none of my characters would go to. If I could start that over again, I would have worried about it 30%-50% of the way through the first draft.

•             Characters will build themselves if you give them a reason to do so.

I wish that I had spent more time determining the motivation for the first actions of the story. I spent so much time worrying about the midpoint and endpoint to the story, when I should have just let the characters get there on their own. When I go back to edit the beginning with a middle and ending already written and I'm confronted by characters with questionable motivations, I have a hard time rewriting in a way that fits the rest of the story.

          

These two things could have made my life at the end of the first draft much simpler. I expected editing to be easy, and instead find myself trying to clean the inside of a prison cell. I'm afraid of continuity issues when I change characters, and afraid of motivations that I establish later on in the book.

       
Focusing on the immediate setting and the immediate problems that my characters face is much more important than any goal or location I want to get them to.