The first draft is never the argument. It is the pile of raw material you will later carve the argument out of, and the fastest way to stall a piece is to demand that both happen in the same sitting.

So I write badly on purpose. Long, unbalanced sentences. Half-finished thoughts left in brackets. Notes to myself in the middle of a paragraph that read like someones shorthand rather than prose. Nothing here is meant to be read by anyone else yet.

The editing pass is where the real work sits. That is when I look for the three or four sentences that are actually load-bearing, delete the scaffolding around them, and find out whether the piece has a spine or only a mood.

Most drafts fail that test. The useful ones fail it early enough that there is still time to start over.