With the help of some $p$-adic formal series over $p$-adic number fields and the estimates of character sums over Galois rings, we prove that there is a constant $C(n)$ such that there exists a primitive polynomial $f(x)\,{=}\,x^{n}-a_{1}x^{n-1}+\cdots +(-1)^{n}a_{n}$ of degree $n$ over $F_{q}$ with the first $m=\lfloor\frac{n-1}{2}\rfloor$ coefficients $a_{1},\ldots ,a_{m}$ prescribed in advance if $q\,{>}\,C(n)$.