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I’ve quoted Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird before, so I won’t do it again. Instead, I’ll paraphrase: write that shitty first draft!
It’s often said that the scariest thing for a writer is a blank page, and I’ve certainly felt that fear. But all writing— novels, blog posts, poems, TV scripts— has to start somewhere. So sit down, turn off that inner critic, and let the writing flow, no matter how terrible you think it is.
How do you do that? Let’s find out.
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Perfectionism and drafting are a doomed match.
Although I first read Bird by Bird in high school, it wasn’t until one of my college playwriting classes that the importance of shitty first drafts really hit me.
At the start of this class, we were given an intense assignment: write a 40-page draft of a play on the theme “camp.” Simple, right?
Well, we had to write the draft in under four days, and turn it in no matter what.
We were explicitly told not to go back and edit, not to even pause in our writing. Just get to 40 pages and turn it in. It’s ok if it’s bad. It’s good if it’s bad. Second, third, and seventeenth drafts are when you edit writing. The first one is just about getting ideas on the page.
Not understanding play formatting at the time, I wrote far more than I needed to, and I did it in three days. But you know what? I worked on that play the rest of that semester and the summer after. It grew into a horror comedy I’m quite fond of. It now lives on my list of “I should do something with that at some point” pieces.
If I had been trying to write my best words for those three days, I would have written 10 pages. Maybe. It’s likely I would have turned in nothing more than an opening scene.
Perfectionism traps you, making you feel like you can’t put ideas on the page until they’re the best ones. You get lost in hours of planning and thinking, writing character descriptions and plot outlines and diagrams without ever actually getting that first draft written out.
Often, I’ve given up on writing projects because I couldn’t get enough drafting done without criticizing myself. This month, I’ve been working on a new fantasy novel, and the only reason I’ve been able to keep that passion is because I don’t care if the draft is good. I haven’t gone back to read it unless I’m looking for a piece of information. That will come later.
But it isn’t easy to just “put the perfectionism away,” right? After all, if you could control it, it wouldn’t bother you so much. And, sadly, I can’t offer a cure for that. But I can offer some ways to help set the perfectionism aside, even for a short time.
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How do I stop fretting and write my first draft?
No two people write alike, and strategies for how to draft aren’t universal. Here are some things that have helped me get my first drafts out:
Try a low-stakes project first. It can be scary to suddenly try turning off the perfectionist voice in your brain and writing a first draft of, say, a term-long research paper. So instead, try it with something else first.
Come up with a random poem, short story, or essay idea. As serious or silly as you want. Tell yourself this is going to be bad, and then write it! Maybe you like it, and you do something with it later. Perhaps that draft ends up abandoned in the trash. Either way, you wrote something, right?
Try to write shitty. Why not take it a step further and actually try to write something bad? Use all the terrible adjectives, make run-on sentences, abandon grammar conventions and even omit the Oxford comma.
It’s a fun exercise that can help you get back in tune with the joy of writing and show yourself that even bad writing has merit. You can focus more on the creativity and less on the craft.
Give yourself a time limit. As my playwriting class showed, this is a great way to force yourself to write without regard to quality. If you only have 30 minutes to draft a chapter, you can’t afford to mull over every sentence!
Don’t stop writing. Within your time limit, try to not stop writing for more than ten seconds. If you don’t know what to say, put a placeholder, maybe [in brackets] or a word like ELEPHANT or just TK. Your draft might end up disjointed and messy, but it’s still a draft.
Turn off grammar checkers. You’ve already got one critic in your head. Do you really need another? Tools like Grammarly and LanguageTool are fantastic additions to your tool belt. But you don’t need them on the first draft.
Most word processors have these features too, but they can be turned off. I personally use iA Writer for a clean, distraction-free screen. There are so many great options out there beyond Docs and Word.
Write by hand. My final tip is one that I’ve found a lot of success with recently, but it might not work for everyone. If you’re able, I find that writing by hand is slower, giving me more time to think as I’m composing sentences, thus reducing how much time I pause.
Additionally, it’s a lot harder for me to skim through my shorthanded cursive writing than neatly-typed text on a screen. This means I spend less time critiquing what I’ve already written and more time writing the next page.
I know writing a first draft is one of the scariest tasks as a writer, so it’s ok to start small. Your first try can be 50% shitty. Then your next first draft is 60% shitty. You see where I’m going?
Regardless of how awful your draft seems, just don’t stop yourself from writing. After all, it’s what you do!
What is your favorite way to turn off your inner critic as you write? Let’s build a collection of ideas! You can leave a comment down below or on my Instagram (@ashtonrosewrites) or Facebook (@ashtonrosewritesfb). And if you liked this post, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
Ashton Rose 