Good activities to help make your “shitty first draft” less shitty:
Having a detailed outline.
Knowing your characters well.
Keeping a record of your character’s growth and goals.
Keeping a record of foreshadowing and plot developments.
Taking short breaks.
Coming back from short breaks.
Forgiving yourself for being an imperfect writer.
Bad, horrible, awful activities which will not make your “shitty first draft” any less shitty, but will absolutely make you sad and frustrated:
Being a perfectionist.
Perfectionism.
Trying to fix all your mistakes.
Not forgiving yourself for making mistakes.
Being a perfectionist.
Moral of the story: Don’t beat yourself up for having less then perfect writing skills. We all have much room to grow and we all need feedback from others before our story can become the best version of itself. A good story can take many, many drafts to get right, and while there are tricks to help you achieve this quicker, no one will ever have it perfect right away.
Keep trying to write better first drafts, but don’t fault yourself when they won’t turn out the way you want them too.
Your first draft does not define your skill as a writer.
I recently wrote a 4,000+ word fanfic and I didn’t delete my shitty drafts because I wanted to see the difference between those and the final version. By drafts I mean several versions of sentences and even entire paragraphs because I can’t move on with the story unless I wrote the sentence or the paragraph correctly. When I finished the fanfic I still made revisions before I was satisfied enough to post it.
Those shitty drafts were progress markers. To think that I started out with some craptastic sentence/idea and ended with something much, much better (to me at least) means that I have hope as a writer.