A messy, no-pressure draft written before your "real" first draft, where the only goal is getting the raw story idea out of your head and onto the page.
A zero draft is the draft before the draft. It is the version of your story where you give yourself full permission to write badly, skip scenes, leave placeholder notes, and generally make a glorious mess. The point is not to produce good prose. The point is to figure out what your story actually is by writing through it as fast and freely as possible. Think of it as a conversation with yourself about what might happen in this book.
The zero draft eliminates the most common reason writers stall out: the pressure to get it right on the first try. By explicitly labeling this draft as "not the real one," you lower the stakes enough to actually put words on the page. It is especially powerful for writers who freeze up at the sight of a blank document, because a zero draft reframes writing from performance into exploration.
Set a timer for thirty minutes and write the roughest possible version of a short story or a single chapter. Use brackets for anything you want to skip, like [fight scene goes here] or [need a better name for this town]. Do not reread what you have written until the timer goes off. When you are done, circle the three sentences that surprise you most. Those are your seeds for the real draft.