Every writer needs to start somewhere, and the advice I live by religiously is that you shouldn’t care about how the draft is looking—whether it be shit or not— and just get the details down, because you’ll end up editing it anyway. I repeat this to myself like a mantra when I write my own stories: “Just write, just write, don’t care about how bad it sounds you can fix it later,” and urging myself to wade through the ocean of shit to get to the golden finish line really does help.
Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” is basically what I’ve already been living by for as long as I was a writer.
“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.”
There’s this phrase that encourages me immensely when I feel dejected about the direction my piece is going in. I tell myself, “I’m cooking! I’m cooking!” which means that I am only in the early stages of my writing process. “Cooking” refers to the fact that I got the ideas (the ingredients) needed to write, and all I need to do is dice, prepare, and simmer them in one large pot to create something delicious.
I didn’t entirely agree with Renee Long’s “Why I Reject the Idea of Shitty First Drafts (And What I Do Instead)” because what I got from her is that she simply renamed the “shitty first draft” into a “seed draft”. Her thinking behind this is that no writer wants to think of their own writing as shit, which is fair, but calling a shit by any other name is still… well, shit. You have to trust yourself to fall into your writing, be comfortable looking for trouble in your writing assignment. You will be bad the first time around, which is okay! Because there will always be the opportunity to try again.
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