I had to learn the hard way the purpose of the second draft. 

My first novel, a magically realistic family chronicle that I never published, was truly awful. In my mind, the entire story was about one thing that the reader either got or didn’t get. It was like an intelligence test. 

What a stupid idea to base your book on. 

My second full-length, Shedding, I did publish, but I’m not very proud of it. I wanted it to be an unconventional love story that would challenge the readers beliefs about right and wrong. I gave the first draft to my spouse to read. I could tell he didn’t like it from two things: it took him forever to read beyond the first ten pages, and he literally told me he didn’t want to be my test audience anymore. 

Ouch. 

All this, of course, was before I learned that the sole point of the second draft was to make it look like you knew what you were doing all along. And I had failed to see it that way. I never knew we were not only allowed but supposed to polish the script after the first draft. 

In retrospect, I think both those novels have a problem of being full of little things, little details and illogicalities that turn the story into a mush. I could have fixed it – I could have organized the mush into something more substantial, or wipe it out of the way of the main story – but I didn’t. And the story suffered. 

Write the first draft as fast as you can. Just get it out, vomiting style. You can figure everything out in the second.