Writers Stop Calling Your First Drafts Sh*tty
The initial draft any new writing project is messy. It is incomplete. A collection of new ideas forming on the page is sometimes awkward, unfinished, embarrassing.
It’s often referred to as a “shitty” first draft.
While Ernest Hemingway famously claimed, “The first draft of anything is shit,” the idea of the shitty first draft is often attributed to Anne Lamott.
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
That’s from her book Bird by Bird, in which she stresses the point of letting go of perfection in order to move past the messiness to the clarity that lies beneath.
Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.
I absolutely understand and agree with Lamott’s idea, and she thoroughly explains the whole point of writing shitty first drafts: to get to the good stuff underneath all the shittiness.
And yet, I urge you not to call your first draft shitty.
I made the decision years ago to stop calling any of my writing shitty.
Or any other negative or insulting words.
Don’t get me wrong: I indulge in profanity on a regular basis, but I believe in being kind to myself, in saying positive words to my creative mind.
I’m careful about using negative self-talk, even in such an obviously humorous way. I find it way too easy to slip from charming self-deprecation to paralyzing self-criticism.
Too much negativism from the inner critic prevents writers from taking action toward their values and goals in their careers.
Call your first draft shitty too many times, and your creative mind starts to respond: Well, then what’s the point of writing at all?
When you dismiss a first draft as shitty, it’s too easy to dismiss the second draft. And the third.
Eventually, you’re stuck in countless revisions and rewrites, telling yourself you’re merely fixing the imperfections, yet unable to judge when the work is finished.
You’ve grown accustomed to calling your work shit. You can only see the “mistakes.” How does a writer know when to stop revising? How do we know when the draft isn’t shitty anymore?
Author and editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch suggest foregoing perfection in writing and instead, after minimal revision, moving forward to the next book:
How do you know when a manuscript is done? That’s trickier. I think you should trust the process, fix the nits, and move to the next book. Writing is a subconscious art, not a conscious one. You heard your first story before you could speak, so your subconscious knows a lot more about writing than your conscious brain ever will.
Trust that.
Many writers don’t believe what I just wrote, and that’s fine. You need to define it for yourself. Set a limit on revisions, set a limit on drafts, set a time limit. (My book must be done in August, no matter what.) Then release your book on the unsuspecting public.
The book will never be perfect.
You are a writer. You must write. Your unique talents grow only by moving forward, by continuously creating and releasing new work.
Often, your words on the page won’t match up identically with your aspirations and your grand ideas. Sometimes that first effort isn’t right at all. It results in a draft of which you are embarrassed to claim ownership.
Still, you must write it. You must accept it as your best work in this moment, fixing what you can, improving your skill and honing your craft, and then moving forward to the next project.
Perfect manuscripts don’t exist.
But — to the sincere and earnest writer — neither do shitty ones.
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