Writing Better First Drafts?

I'm a discovery writer, but even when I write a scene from notes, I generally don't know what exactly the scene will look like until I've written it. Since everything I write following this scene will be directly influenced by it, I NEED to be happy with it before I move on.

How do you manage flow and overall plot structure? Even with carefully designed plot structure, I spend a ton of time cutting things down or tightening exposition to improve flow. Trying to do that while also navigating the rise and ebb of tension as well as overall rising action, climax, and denouement all at once just baffles me.

Just to write decent characters, I have to do character studies - even if it is a somewhat-self insert or based on a loved one. Before I learned to do that, my characters were all basically versions of myself who have the advantage of editing to make them much more clever than I am as well as a shallow one-event backstory like the main character in a 90-minute action movie.

Further, while thinking up what to write next, the Goliath I force myself to slay before beginning to write a single chapter is the climax (sometimes two of them in a two act novel). Coming up with something that isn't stolen (or that is at least sufficiently "innovated") takes me ages and I have an entire channel on my personal Discord just for throwing out climactic hooks for my friends to then blow up by telling me from where I stole them (often from numerous sources). Sometimes they give suggestions on how to make the idea fresh, but mostly they just blow them all to hell or even point me back to when I made basically the same suggestion a year ago and they blew it all to hell.

I'm impressed, envious, and baffled by how some writers manage to do this.

/r/writing Thread Parent