What the Myth Actually Sounds Like
The myth shows up in different disguises. Sometimes it’s a structural problem you know about and keep typing past. Sometimes it’s a character motivation that doesn’t quite hold up and you’ve told yourself the reader won’t notice until you make it make sense in the next pass. Sometimes it’s a scene you know is wrong but you’re in the flow and you don’t want to stop.
The note you leave yourself says: I’ll know what this means later.
- Why it works (on you)The myth survives because revision is real. Revision does fix things. Writers who’ve never revised a word of their own work produce unreadable first drafts, and that’s a real problem. So the logic feels sound: first drafts are for getting it down, revision is for making it good. The problem is that this truth gets weaponized as an excuse to avoid doing the harder thinking in the draft.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s famous “shitty first drafts” essay gets misread constantly. What she’s saying is that permission to write badly is permission to write freely, not permission to write without thinking. The goal of a first draft is still to get the story down with enough intentionality that revision can work with it. A draft that says “fix this later” in fifteen places isn’t a first draft. It’s an outline with sentences. - How to do itBefore you move past a problem, write down exactly what the problem is and exactly what you think the solution might be. Not “fix this.” Fix what? Not “make this better.” Better how? The note has to be specific enough that a version of you who has completely forgotten this moment can pick it up and understand it.
“This scene needs to show that Jack doesn’t trust Ray yet, but the dialogue is making him seem compliant. Consider adding the moment where he checks if the truck is unlocked before he gets in.”
That’s a note. “Fix this scene” is not a note.
Do
Stop when you hit a problem and spend five minutes writing the most specific note you can. The five minutes now saves the hours later.
Avoid
Vague notes that assume future-you has the same context present-you does. Future-you is a different person. They’ve written fifty more pages since this moment. They’ve slept. They’ve forgotten.
From My Work
Salt & Bone is currently being re-released with a new beginning, middle, and ending. I wrote the original book, told myself certain things would make sense once I got further into the series, and kept going. That was years ago. The version of me who knew exactly what I meant by certain choices in that draft doesn’t exist anymore. The re-release exists because “I’ll fix it later” ran out the clock on “later.”
The Memory Problem
Writers dramatically overestimate how much they’ll remember. The idea that seemed obvious in the draft, the motivation you could feel but didn’t write down, the thematic thread you were sure was visible—all of it degrades. Fast.
- Why it works (on you)In the moment, the thing feels so clear. You know why the character makes this choice. You know where this is going. The logic is right there in your head, fully formed, obvious. Writing it down feels redundant.
Three months later, six months later, seven years later, that logic is gone. What’s left is the prose that was supposed to carry it, which is doing half the job it needed to do because you trusted your future self to finish the other half. - How to do itWrite the invisible logic down. Not just the what, the why. Not just “Jack doesn’t trust Ray” but “Jack doesn’t trust Ray because Ray disappeared for fourteen years after Jack’s mother died and never explained why, and Jack has never directly asked, and that silence sits between them for the whole book.” Write the thing that feels too obvious to write. Future-you will be grateful.
In Story by Robert McKee, there’s a principle that structure is the writer’s responsibility before it’s the reader’s experience. The structure has to be in the manuscript, not in your head. What lives in your head and nowhere else is invisible to everyone, including future-you.
Do
Keep a living document alongside your draft. Not just a note file. A document that tracks the why behind every major choice. Character motivations. Thematic intentions. The meaning of a specific scene. Update it as you go.
Avoid
Trusting your memory across a gap of more than two weeks. Two weeks is generous. Most writers forget the specifics of a scene within days of writing it if they haven’t written the context down somewhere.
From My Work
There are scenes in the original Salt & Bone that I know meant something specific when I wrote them. I can feel the intention. I cannot reconstruct the original logic well enough to execute it cleanly in the re-release without essentially starting fresh. That’s not a revision problem. That’s a “I’ll remember this” problem compounded by years.
The Debt Accumulates
Every unfixed problem in a draft is a debt. You’re borrowing time from future-you and paying interest on it. One “fix it later” is manageable. Fifteen “fix it laters” is a draft that revision can’t save without a near-total rewrite.
- Why it works (on you)Individual problems feel small. One unclear motivation, one scene that doesn’t quite land, one character who shows up in chapter three and doesn’t behave consistently with who they’ll become by chapter twelve. Each one, alone, feels like a small thing. Together, they compound.
By the time revision comes around, you’re not fixing small things. You’re untangling a structural debt that has been accruing since page one. In The Anatomy of Story by John Truby, he argues that most problems in a final draft can be traced back to foundational problems in the premise or character web that were never properly worked out. Writers who skip the thinking in the draft arrive at revision with a debt they can’t pay in one pass. - How to do itWhen you hit a problem, ask whether it’s a surface problem or a foundation problem. A clunky line of dialogue is surface. A character who doesn’t have a clear want and need is foundation. Surface problems survive “fix it later.” Foundation problems do not. Foundation problems need to be solved before you build the rest of the house on top of them.
Do
Stop and solve foundation problems in the draft. Not perfectly. But enough. Enough that you know what you’re building toward. Enough that the next fifty pages have solid ground under them.
Avoid
Writing past a foundation problem because stopping feels like losing momentum. The momentum you lose stopping to solve a foundation problem is nothing compared to the momentum you lose scrapping fifty pages because they were built on an unstable premise.
From My Work
The re-release of Salt & Bone has a new beginning, middle, and ending. That’s foundation work. That’s what happens when the foundation problems from the original draft were trusted to “later” and later finally arrived.
What Revision Is Actually For
Revision is for refinement, not rescue. It’s for making a working draft better, not for making a broken draft functional. When writers use revision as a safety net for every problem they didn’t want to solve in the draft, they arrive at the revision stage with a manuscript that needs rescue, not refinement.
The work of revision is real and necessary and often where the best writing happens. The sentence that finally says the thing you were trying to say for three drafts. The scene that clicks into place when you can see the whole shape of the book. The character beat that lands harder in the fourth pass because you finally understand who this person is.
None of that work is possible if the draft underneath it is built on borrowed time and forgotten intentions.
Do
Think of revision as the place where good writing becomes great. Not the place where broken writing becomes passable.
Avoid
Writing a draft you know needs rescue. It’s a different task, and it’s a harder one, and it costs more than you think it will.
Final Thoughts
The note you leave in the margin of your draft is a promise to yourself. The problem is that the self who has to keep the promise is a different person than the one who made it. That person has forgotten the context, lost the thread, moved on.
Write the thing down. Solve the foundation problem before you build on top of it. Don’t trust your memory across months or years.
Future-you is not better at this than present-you. They just have less context and more to fix.
Extras
- Read about Salt & Bone
- Read about The Death of Me
- Sign up for the newsletter to get weekly tips
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Story by Robert McKee
- The Anatomy of Story by John Truby