He looked at the papers again. "I want it to. But look at it. It's full of holes. The characters are flat. The dialogue is stiff."

"Of course it is," Clara said with a small smile. "It's a first draft. It’s the skeleton, the bare bones. All that matters right now is that you’re getting it down, getting it out of your head. You can't fix a blank page, Elias. You can only fix what’s already there."

He looked at the title he’d scrawled at the top of the first page: “All That Matters.”

He thought about the advice he’d read once: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story” . It wasn't meant to be perfect; it was meant to exist. Yet, the weight of his own expectations felt like a physical burden. He kept comparing his messy, incomplete thoughts to the polished masterpieces on his bookshelf.