First Draft 1.3.1

New Year Tidying or “Osoji”

(1.18.16 First Draft was the “rough draft” of Rough Draft’s name • update)

In Japan–where we’re based–at the end of the year you do a big Spring cleaning or “Osoji/大掃除”, so you’re ready to spring�…

See Through

“Tabula Rasa” Story Seed

I woke up in a dark room that smelled of filth and worse. I was lying on a stained mattress that lay directly on the floor. Horizontal shafts of electric blue light stabbed into the darkness through a boarded over window. I sat up and the room spun…

3/30: trail mix

You can see the top of the mountain from here

Like a middle finger to the purple sky

Even though it’s nearly midnight and fucking raining

So tonight it’s not trail mix

3 Major Types of Rewrites, and the Big Mistake to Avoid with All of Them

One of the first things a writer learns is about the power — and the challenge — of the rewrite. For those writers who assume that everything Ernest Hemingway wrote flowed perfectly out of his pen on the…

It is hard to fight with desire; but to overcome it is the mark of a rational man. -Democritus

We all have wants, they are that which drive us. These wants can simply be the impulse to hit that snooze button one more time, to have that one last piece of cookie, to procrastinate on that one Philosophy Pre-Socratic reflection…

How about a 💩 writing prompt to get you writing that first Hemingway-inspired shitty sentence? We are completely on board with this advice, and you put it more eloquently then we ever could have when we built writing prompts into our First Draft writing app. In retrospect though, maybe we should have called it First Sentence 😆 If we decide to use…