What are first drafts for?

Right now, I am simply forging ahead on my novels, including notes here and there where changes will have to be made (I use a series of capital Xs to mark the spots), but I won't make those changes now. In my last post, I mentioned that Anna in The Fictional Writer needs to be more complex--more stuff bubbling up to the surface. She has a lot of undercurrents of angst and ambivalence, but so far, I haven't made them big enough to truly trip her up. That will happen in the rewrites, but it is soooo hard to keep on writing and not go back to the beginning and start putting stuff into the story.

Patience is the name of the game. I put on blinders, in a sense, and keep advancing. Once the first draft is completely done (by the end of the year, God willing) I can go back and rework all the stuff, stick in the details I still need to find through research, and look for the holes in the structure. I will probably bribe a couple of my critique members to read through the whole book for me and give me their comments. One of them is particularly susceptible to brownies.