What are the main objectives of the first draft?
Each person looks for one thing or another when writing their first draft of a novel, but in general, there are some objectives that help a lot to take into account:
1. Turn the idea into something concrete
The idea of the novel looks beautiful in your head, but taking it to the physical plane is something quite hard and at first does not even resemble what you have in mind. But it doesn't matter, even if it's not exactly what you want, at least you lay the foundation for what the finished novel will be. You turn the idea into something physical, written, concrete, something you can work on. If the novel is a sculpture, you are bringing the granite block into the studio and you are removing the more coarse leftover parts.
2. Finish writing the story
This may be the longest part of the process, but it is the most important. To start correcting the first draft, you must first write the first draft. From pe to pa. From start to finish. All scenes. Complete the story so that someone can pick up the text and read it, and find out about the story that is there, the characters, even if they are very crude versions.
Moving forward is so important that it is even recommended to leave for then the things that do not matter at that time. Character names, even difficult concrete dialogue, can be left blank, with a little note of "here happens, write well then". Nor is it a plan to leave the entire scene, but there is no problem in using that kind of patches or placeholders to hold the place while you continue writing.
And that's it. Really, there isn't much else. The two goals you have to keep in mind, at least, when writing first drafts, are those two. You have to bring the story to the physical and immutable plane of the manuscript and you have to finish it in order to start correcting it.
There are many ways to make first drafts. Either through placeholders, or with summarized versions of the scenes that you then expand, writing only the dialogues... the ending doesn't even have to be a readable novel, no one has to read the first draft.
In the first draft you can experiment or you can write without previous structure (I do not recommend the latter in general, but here everyone with their things), and it does not matter at all if we are wrong. What's more, the ideal is that if we see that something is very wrong, do not correct it and keep pulling forward, because the goal of the draft is not to leave things very nice and legible, it is to put the words on the paper (or screen, or wax tablet, I know, I do not judge anyone by their writing materials) and finish the story. At most you are allowed to put an annotation ("I of the future, we must correct this mess").
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