Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper.
–Anne Lamott
My high school English teacher introduced me to this advice. My class read a passage from Ann Lamott’s book Bird by Bird where Lamott encourages writers to write crappy first drafts. Like it or not, that’s where writing begins. Over two decades later (has it been that long!), I’m still hearing the same advice: get that crappy first draft down on the page.
And yet I’ve been so reluctant to follow it.
Broken Practices
My usual method used to go like this:
- Sit down and peck at the keys so as to create only “perfect” sentences. This means I edit as I go. Hours and hours later, I have 300 – 500 words.
- Days (or maybe weeks) later, I come up with a draft of a chapter.
- Proud of my “masterpiece”, I present my work to readers for critique. They show me how not perfect it is.
- Later, I have to go back and change the chapters I’d spent so much time on–often cutting those sentences I had tried to perfect at the first go.
Despite this method being so inefficient and often fruitless, I still cling to it at times. It’s not easy to allow myself to write a crappy first draft, as I mentioned in an earlier post. Even as I’m writing this post, I’m having difficulty letting go of the old ways! Why? Because of perfectionism.
This love of perfectionism is also the reason why I find it hard to write some days. As I’ve heard it said before:
There’s no such thing as writer’s block, just perfectionism block.
But fortunately, I’m learning the valuable lesson of breaking from perfectionism (as far as first drafts are concerned anyway).
Allowing myself to write crap
During this last few weeks, I’ve been working on the draft of my next book. But instead of using my usual method and producing words at a glacial pace, I’m adhering to Ann Lamott’s advice by writing that crappy first draft.
And it’s awesome!
My writing is much more productive than before. I’m getting down 800 – 1,000+ words per session, and I hope to quicken my pace further as I distance myself more and more from perfectionism.
Is the content I’m creating any good? Most of it isn’t. But that’s not the point. I’m getting the ideas on the page, and many new ideas I hadn’t thought of before are being born in the process. And hey!–there might even be a few gems in there.
Am I going to cut and change most of what I’ve written? Most definitely! But here’s an important thing I need to remind myself: I also cut and changed most of the “perfect” content I wrote in my old method.
Ann Lamott’s way is proving to be a much better use of my time.
All this to say, I’m a big advocate for writing the crappy first draft. If you’re having trouble getting your writing done, I urge you to let go of your perfection and allow yourself to write crap. Just get your ideas down on the page.
For me, it took decades for this advice to finally sink in. Don’t make the same mistake!
How do you approach your first draft? Do you allow yourself to write crap?
Please share in the comments below.
Up to a point, but there have to be some standards. There is no point ending up with a draft so bad I can’t salvage anything, also because I’ll start rambling if unrestrained. I give myself a time limit to find the perfect word, then I have to move on.
I allow me to write crappy chapters.
But then I revise them before writing the next ones, because as a pantser, I need a functional starting point for my pantsing session, or I end up with a meandering something that is anything but a story.
You need solid ground to jump, on soft sand you will probably only nosedive.
I also suffer from first draft neurosis – but only with fiction. As the author of over thirty print and digital non-fiction published books I have no problem with the quality of the first draft. This is because I know that in the end it will all come right. Turning to writing fiction has been a nightmare because I am incapacitated by the mediocrity of my first draft. The advice is absolutely right – just keep going. If all the ingredients for successful fiction are present in the final draft (after many failed attempts) your manuscript will be ready for publication.
I learned some time ago that I can actually write at a fairly good clip — 1000–1250 words per day (sometimes 1500). That’s when I *am* writing, that is. (Right now I am not writing, but I am, unfortunately, dealing with a bunch of things — a death in the family, having to relocate, no job, etc. Ugh!)
My writing problem tends to be to not want to do the work on what I’ve produced, because I don’t think what I’ve produced is good enough. It’s not so much about trying to write perfect copy from the start, but more about the hesitancy to perfect it afterwards. That’s where my perfectionism tends to creep in. But is that what it would really be called? I don’t know.
I started off a pantser, but now I simply cannot write that way. Too bloody much leeway and not enough direction. So, I started to plan things, kinda-sorta. Not in detail, but more in the way of knowing where I want to go with a scene. Having a scene goal in mind, I guess you could say. I guess that makes this plantsing. LOL
One thing that helped me was when I first started to seriously put into practice the things taught by Algis Budrys in his remarkable little book, Writing to the Point. That’s where I first learned about story structure, and not the nonsense of screenplay/teleplay structure frequently promoted for prose fiction. I find there are too many differences between screenplays/teleplays and prose fiction for that structure — generally the structure taught by Syd Field, though some prefer that taught by Blake Snyder — to be relevant for prose fiction. Teleplays have to deal with advertising interruptions. Screenplays, though a little more like prose fiction, are still different. They feel more like a story overview to me than a fully developed story. Of the ideas put out by Field and Blake, I prefer Field’s. Blake’s ideas are far too constricting, defining what has to happen with every minute of a movie. Imagine doing that with a novel. ~ rolls over and dies ~ And James Scott Bell, in one of his books, when he talks about the “First Plot Point” — that’s a Syd Field thing right there — mentions that if you follow the idea typically recommended on when it’ll happen, it’ll feel like your story is dragging at the beginning. He argues that in prose fiction, it’s got to happen sooner than Field’s 25% rule. So, Bell justifies my reticence about these film structure models. If they’re of any use, they *HAVE* to be modified for prose fiction.
Anyway, once I started using the ideas Budrys put forth in that little book, I started to get handwritten rejections. No publications yet, but I’m working on it. Right now, though, I first have to get through the things I mentioned at the beginning that I’m going through.
This resonates so much with me! I’m a recovering perfectionist as well! I try to remind myself of the fact that writing and editing are actually using two different sides of my brain – that’s why it’s best to only do one at a time. It is so freeing to just get words on the page and not worry about editing as I go. Great reminder – thanks, Jason!
Glad to help, Ellen!
I write a very crappy draft. Then edit the crappy draft and add more crappy things in. Then focus on one chapter and edit it numerous times until I am still unhappy about it. I put it up for review on a writer’s group and then re write it numerous more times after the feedback received, tears it apart to shreds. Then I leave it for a while and procrastinate, finding any excuse to do anything but write. I then come back to it much later and decide to just keep at it remembering that I write because it makes me happy and I enjoy expressing the wild and wonderful ideas down on paper regardless of how imperfect it reads or what people think.