There’s a common piece of writing advice: Write crappy first drafts. The inimitable Anne Lamott has an entire chapter dedicated to it in her classic writing book Bird by Bird—although her chapter title is “Shitty First Drafts,” to put a finer point on it.
Listen, I’m not here to argue with Anne Lamott. In my critique group, we use “SFD” as shorthand to let other people know (and remind ourselves) that the first draft should be bad. For the entire first draft of my first novel, the header of the Word document bore the words “shitty first draft.”
Check out the first part of Bad Writing Advice – should you write every day?
Like all bad writing advice, there is a kernel of merit that comes from the intent behind the advice, if not the actual way it’s communicated. The purpose of encouraging writers to write bad first drafts is to overcome the paralysis of perfectionism, to allow you to just write rather than worrying about how it sounds at first. And this is good! If you’re too worried about making it perfect on the first go, you’ll end up staring at a blinking cursor for hours instead of writing.
So what’s the catch?
It is possible to go too far with writing a bad draft. Because, at some point, have to edit that first draft. And pulling up a document riddled with typos, inconsistencies, or question marks can be disheartening.
Here’s an important note: That threshold of “so discouraging that you never want to look at the first draft again” is, like so much of writing, different for each person. Some people can wade through misspellings and “?????” scattered through their manuscript and not bat an eye. Some people need a cleaner draft to start with.
The trick is figuring out what you need.
Even if it’s your first time writing a book, you probably already have an idea of how sensitive you are to mistakes in writing, just from all the reading you’ve done. Does it bug you when someone uses the wrong form of “your” in a Facebook post or forgets a word in an email? Or are you able to breeze past it? Chances are, whatever level of annoyance you feel at another person’s mistake will be a good measure for how you’ll respond to your own.
Once you have a good idea of how much you think you’ll be able to handle in editing, work backwards to see how you can prevent your first draft from hitting that threshold when writing it. Some people do writing sprints where they don’t take their fingers off the keyboard for a set amount of time. This forces you to get words on the page, and you can always go back and edit them later. This is a great strategy for lots of writers, who might not mind working through those little mistakes that are inevitable when typing fast, and who enjoy the editing part more than the drafting part.
Personally, that’s never worked for me. Would I get more words on the page? Sure. But I’ve realized that I like to take a little longer in my first drafts. I don’t let myself get bogged down, but if I come back to a draft to edit and can’t read without cringing—either because of mistakes or because the writing isn’t up to my usual standards—it doesn’t motivate me to edit. It just makes me procrastinate writing (even more than I usually do).
If that sounds similar to you, then it’s okay to write a little slower on a first draft. Go back and fix typos you notice. Give yourself a minute to think of what word you want. The key is to not let yourself get dragged down in all this, or frozen by perfectionism. Your first draft still doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough.
So, in the end, you’ll still be writing a bad first draft. It’s just not possible to write something perfect on the first shot (and if you do, I don’t want to know about it!). But don’t take this advice too far, or you may end up with something that is more discouraging than freeing.
How do you write first drafts? Do you do writing sprints? Let me know in the comments!
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Featured image by Lauren Mancke