Shitty First Drafts

[wolffyluna]

There's a common piece of writing advice that goes "Your first draft will be terrible. It will be the worst writing ever. It will be a steaming pile of bullcrap that even a dog wouldn't eat. But that's okay :D! Because your later drafts will be infinitely better :D!"

Okay, I'll admit to exageratting there. A little But I stil hate that writing advice. Deeply. I'm sure it's great advice for some people! I mean, I doubt it is, but that's probably me typical minding.

But that advice severely knocked about my writing confidence for several years, for no good reason.

You see, to my eye, my first drafts are fine. Sure, they've got rough edges, but they're basically okay. My second drafts and third etc drafts aren't necessarily that different? The prose might be a bit nicer, scenes flow together better, but there's no huge jumps in quality. They're pretty similar.

Which meant under the 'first drafts are shit' paradigm, one of two things was happening:

1. My first drafts were shit, my second drafts were not, I was just really bad at judging writing quality.
2. My first drafts were shit, my second drafts were also shit because they were not that different from the first drafts, and I should never try and judge the quality of literature ever again.

None of those were exactly comforting! And it really messed up my ability to be confident in my writing for some time.

I ended up getting myself unstuck by learning 3 things:

1. Any writing advice that makes it harder to write is bad advice.
2. Any writing advice or truism that cannot articulate why it is the case or why it is helpful advice should be treated as deeply suspect
3. I saw people actually articulate the use of the Shitty First Drafts Principle. It was about getting ideas down fast and freely without worrying about the quality of the prose, or whether the plot was consistent, or whatever.

I tend to write weirdly detailed outlines. Like, outlines that include individual lines of dialogue or rough sketches of dialogue, that level of detail. I find these useful because they let me get ideas down fast and freely, without worrying about making pretty prose, and let me fix any inconsistencies during the outlining phase before committing to a whole ass prose draft.

...So, basically what I was doing was making a shitty first draft, except I called it an outline.

But I still reject the framing of 'shitty first draft'.

1. Now that I'm more confident in my writing ability, I'm much more comfortable saying this: Do you want to call my work shitty to my face? Ooooh, you're just "generalising" and "including yourself as well" and "helping other artists". No. If you want to call my work shitty, say that in a review and provide citations. Do not say that kind of stuffy lightly, or without the understanding of the power behind it.
2. My outlines are not a first draft. They are outlines. They are not prose. And saying they're bad prose is like saying storyboards are bad animation. That's not how this works.

(...I didn't realise how strong my feelings were about this, or how swearing I would get. Sorry about that?)

(I think also the difference between the people this advice works for and me is that they find the idea that they can make writing that's "bad" or "shitty" to be freeing, while for I find that constricting.)

Comments

[yvannairie]

I also think that's another big advice that's been hit with people conflating "not perfect" with "bad" -- a thing the internet and people and society is known for doing. Like other people have told you, the point is to make yourself more open to no first draft being flawless so you're more tolerant of the jank that gets smoothed out by the process and don't get overwhelmed by the "wow this is nothing like how I imagined it would be" response -- a response that not even every creative has, mind, it depends a lot on what type of an imaginative someone is.

That being said, you aren't exaggerating at all, and I'm also kind of frustrated at how "first draft" has been reduced to a slur, and how much editing/editorialising your own stories is valorised. It does a disservice to the kind of writing that ages better the less it's edited, because with repeated reading you can trace out the bones of the feeling jutting out from under the prose. (Gone are the days when we'd put "unbetaed/written in a daze/this exploded out of my chest, behold the gory aftermath" as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on something that Wanted Out, I guess.)

I actually got into an argument about this with one of my betas after they started smoothing out every sentence of a draft that was Good To Publish after the worst grammatical fouls were cleaned up -- there's value in writing that isn't polished to a mirror sheen. What is a mistake elsewhere can be a part of the texture in some other place.

(I also feel you on the outlining. That's where the shitty, scrambly, messy part happens -- first draft is where we either see if the thing comes to life or if I've set the bones down wrong. If I hate the thing after the first draft, that's not a sign that the draft is shitty, that's a sign that the bones of it are.)

[chocochipbiscuit]

I think also the difference between the people this advice works for and me is that they find the idea that they can make writing that's "bad" or "shitty" to be freeing, while for I find that constricting.

I'm reading this with a lot of interest because I am someone who genuinely falls into the 'freeing' side of this.

Like, I've been fortunate enough to have had moments where the prose just flows. I need minimal editing, most of it comes out lovely, and I can bang out most of a fic in one sitting. Those moments are wonderful and feel incredibly relaxing when I'm in that flow state.

But most of the time, it's...not. It's work. It's enjoyable work, but it's still work.

Allowing myself to fail means that I can just focus on the work of it, the sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude that 'yeah, it's gonna be shitty, but that's okay, I can pick it over later' instead of holding out for those golden moments where it feels stunningly easy.

Anyways. I do the same thing with outlines (I love bullet points! And organized scenes! And little notes about key bits of dialogue and specific images or metaphors I want to use in the prose!) and having a good outline definitely helps lead towards a better first draft, but a first draft is, by its very nature, the 'first' and therefore weakest version of whatever you want the final project to look like. I don't consider my outlines to be first drafts, no matter how detailed, because I think I hold a mental block on calling anything with bullet points a 'first draft.'

Obviously, YMMV with all kinds of things in life. Writing advice isn't any different. Just use what works for you and kick aside what doesn't.

Thank you for the post, it made me think!

[lb_lee]

Man, I LOATHE outlining. I only started doing it with the really big long things where I realized that after fifty short stories written out of order, I needed to be sure of what happened when so I didn't have basic continuity errors like, say, two stories taking place right next to each other but in different seasons.

But I can't go in-depth or I just stiffen up.

In my case, writing shitty is honestly liberating because I wanted to learn to suck exuberantly and break my own perfectionism. But I don't go around telling other people their work sucks, that's a jerk move.

I do think that over-editing is a problem. I look through some of my old-ass work, and I see the parts I just edited over and over, never getting anywhere, reaching the writing equivalent of that poor schmuck who draws all their art at 200% print size and fixates on making every line perfectly smooth even though nobody will even notice when it's printed. (I have known people like this. I am shocked they manage to FINISH anything, it sounds awful.)

Sometimes, a writer just has to let it go and accept when it's done. But I think there's a lot of anxiety and insecurity about it, so folks cut themselves down and say how shitty their work is so they can beat everyone to the punch.

--Rogan