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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36251
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you are not primarily an "exploration writer" (or even if you are), there is a lot of advance work that can make your first draft better. This includes **worldbuilding** --coming up with rich and expansive details and backstories about your characters and settings (even knowing not all of it will feature in your final work), **outlining** , which is structuring your overall plot, the relationships between the characters, and the major actions before starting writing, and **visualization** , which is picturing the characters' interactions, dialogue and settings before writing.

Is all of this enough to skip the rewriting process? There is one successful longer work I know of that --at least reportedly --was published largely in the form of its first draft, Keroauc's _On the Road_. And, personally speaking, I do only first drafts when I'm writing _poetry_ (because editing seems to ruin whatever magic they have).

But, in general, if you do only a _first draft_, you are putting yourself at an extreme, quite possibly insurmountable disadvantage versus any other writer. **More of what makes any successful and respected artist, of any kind, is hard work than it is either talent or inspiration.** This means that avoiding hard work ("things I don't enjoy") is never a pathway to success. (I've learned that to my own sorrow.) It has been noted that authors can write characters who are smarter, wittier, and quicker than they are, simply because a lot of author work --invisible to the end reader --can go into a single character action or quote. To put this another way, the reading public generally demands a high level of polish, sophistication, clarity and lack of bloat from the writing they spend time with --a level that is nearly impossible to achieve without at least some rewriting and editing. (On the other hand, there are successful authors who do only _two_ drafts.)

Original score: 7