Writing Advice Wednesday: Shitty First Drafts Make It All Less Daunting

I used to be a “my first draft is my final draft and it’s perfect” type of writer. I would sit down, capture lightning in a bottle, and that was my art.

Nobody’s that good.

Ohhh, I’ve since learned the beautiful benefits of revisions, where you can really chisel the lump of marble into a finely detailed sculpture. I still treat sitting down to a blank page like the curtain rising on opening night, but I’m learning to embrace the idea of the shitty first draft.

The idea of the shitty first draft comes from Anne Lamott’s wonderful writing advice book Bird for Bird, where she writes that “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.” The idea is simple: Take off the filter, take off the idea of art, and just write, knowing you can come back to it later to rewrite and revise.

Essentially, it takes all the pressure off being brilliant, creative, and articulate. It takes the performance anxiety out of it, too. If you alter your mindset to value having a draft to work off of, and know that writing happens in the revisions, you’re more willing to pound something out just to get it out and start the real work.

I mostly hear this in the fiction world, and Lamott uses the example of writing an essay in her book. But there’s a certain element of privacy to those kinds of writing. I may write a shitty first draft of a novel, but then my second and third and forth draft is mine as well. No one may see it until it’s very polished. Even then, a piece of fiction is still my created voice, my characters, my work — there’s still a sense of ownership over it.

But what if what you’re writing isn’t yours, but belongs to someone else?

Now that I’ve been doing more freelance work, I’m finding myself writing blog posts, articles, courses, and copy for other people, often with research I’m new to, often with a tight turn-around. Not only do you need to write the thing, but you need to have the right voice for the right audience, make sure the research is correct, send it off in record time, and impress your client with your amazing writing skills so they’ll keep sending you work.

That will certainly up the anxiety for you! It’s a little daunting.

Which is why the shitty first draft for articles, blog posts, and courses is even more important. Just write it. Don’t worry about voice. You can check your facts or add in citations later. You can fix up phrases afterwards. You can add in examples that you missed to round the whole thing out once you have a draft. And actually, writing a shitty first draft and then revising it is going to take less time, energy, and stress then trying to get your piece right the first time.

For example, I needed to write a piece the other day and time was getting tight. I had loaded up my brain with research the night before, and I just wrote it. I wrote the introduction knowing I’d tweak it later. I wrote the first half not checking word count, just wanting to get it out. I remember writing a sentence thinking, “This is a terrible sentence!” but I didn’t stop to mull over it or tinker with it then. I just moved on. I remember writing a portion thinking, “This is probably too long,” but I didn’t stop to see what I could cut. I just finished it and moved on. I had a draft quickly, and then was able to just spend time shaping it into what I wanted it to be.

So allow yourself to give shitty first drafts a try — and I say “allow” because as writers, we’re conditioned to want to make our performance perfect on the first run-through at the blank page. But hacking a rough shape out of marble is a heck of lot easier knowing we don’t have to make art of it in one try.