Shitty First Sentences

People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published, and maybe even doing well financially, and think they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times, to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this just the fantasy of the uninitiated. — Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott made the concept of a shitty first draft a common practice for writers in her book Bird By Bird. The idea behind it is you write something that you know won’t be that good and you’ll come back to edit it, clean it up and shape it into something that as my friend and writer Ashley Ambirge would say hits people in the face with a crowbar. This assumes that you have enough in that skull of yours to pour out onto the page. You actually do, but until you’ve developed a habit of writing that might be a bit too much pressure.

Start with a Shitty First Sentence

For people who are getting started, I advocate a much easier approach: a shitty first sentence. That means you can write anything you want.

• The dog crossed the road.
• The coffee burnt my tongue.
• Why am I writing this shitty first sentence?

As you can see I’m incredibly imaginative with my shitty first sentences.

A shitty first sentence serves one main purpose. It gets your fingers moving and something on the page.

It’s a warm up. When you were a kid you could take a noun and a verb and create an entire story without thinking twice about the absurdity of each sentence. That’s the person you need to let yourself be for just a moment each day.

Anybody can write a shitty first sentence.

It takes hardly any time.

You’re not trying to win a Pulitzer.

It can be repeated nearly everyday.

And if you’re really a nut job that wants to trick your brain into thinking you’ve made progress before you even sit down, write your shitty first sentence for tomorrow today. This is a brain hack based on the research of Shawn Achor. This works because the closer your brain thinks it is to a goal, the more likely you are to accomplish it. You don’t even have to come up with the first sentence. You could just put a quote that is better than your shitty first sentence.

My notebooks are filled with shitty first sentences and half baked thoughts. Sometimes we won’t be able to conjure up much more than a shitty first sentence and that’s fine. Our ideas need time to bake. I can’t tell you the number of times a shitty first sentence has turned into something that I find myself completely delighted by, the kind of writing that you put on display with swagger. “Yeah mother f#$#ker I wrote that ” kind of swagger.

The hardest thing about writing a shitty first sentence is embracing how shitty it is. If you’re somebody who prides your self on your eloquence and sophistication with the written word, you’ll have to get over that.

Judging your work while you’re creating it is the kiss of death to self expression.

As Amber Rae once told me in an interview “you want to accumulate pages not judgements.” And that was the first decent sentence I wrote this morning. It was preceded by a shitty first, second, third, fourth, and fifth sentence,probably more. (Most of this post was written over a couple days as the ideas came to me).

You show up at a blank page having checked everything at the door, your ego, your agenda, and your expectations. Bring those things into the room and you’ll resist writing a shitty first sentence. It’s almost like you have to disassociate from your body and act like it’s been taken over by some alien life form who has decided your only job for the next 30 mins, hour or whatever time you’ve committed to is to move your fingers. You can always go back, edit and subtract later. Right now the only job you have is to get words on the page until you hit some milestone.

When a shitty first draft seems too daunting, start with a shitty first sentence. If you need some encouragement watch this animated short in which my friend Sarah Peck talks about what happens when you commit to the act of creating.

I’m the host of The Unmistakable Creative podcast. You can subscribe to it via iTunes.