Just finished reading Wanting by Luke Burgis. In the final section, he writes about first drafts:
Girard believed that the best novelists read their first drafts and see right through them. They see that the first draft was a “put-up job”—an unconscious attempt to deceive their readers and themselves about the complexity of their desires. (Stephen King has written that the most important thing he learned from Carrie White, the lead character in his first horror story, is that “the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s.”)
I came across this highlight Zen in the Art of Writing about drafts. The other drafts will change, the characters will evolve. But the first draft does lay the foundation down.
You’ll get a different shade of gray if you start 90% dark and 10% light.
Two Stephen King stories with a similar theme: teenage revenge.
Carrie uses telekinesis to murder everyone in a fire.
Lardass Logan eats a bunch of pie and throws up on everyone at the pie eating contest.
Different mix of light and dark.