Embracing Ugly Drafts

Has this ever happened to you?

You have an idea for a story, a book, an article, a blog post, and in your head it sounds perfect. All your ideas come to you with lightning speed. You’ve really hit on something!

Not wanting to let the idea get cold, you rush to your computer, open up a Word document and start to tap out the brilliant sentences that have been filling your brain. You write and write, only to discover that what came out on the page is awful — truly horrible — something a third grader would be ashamed of.

You ask yourself, what happened to those beautifully formed ideas and sentences and cogent, sharp arguments? Why is the writing so bad? You are sufficiently discouraged to give up writing altogether and leave writing to “the experts.” Who are you anyhow to write?

So what happened between the brilliant idea in your head and the clunky prose laying like road kill on your page? Two words: FIRST DRAFT.

When you read a published book or article — especially one that’s beautifully written — it can be hard to believe the writing wasn’t always so well put together. But if you keep in mind that the author probably went through multiple drafts before having something he felt was good enough to turn in to the publisher…

…and then the editor got her hands on it and told him all sorts of ways his manuscript didn’t work and what he needed to do to get it up to speed…

…and then the revised manuscript was line-edited to take out all the clunky-ness and make it sing…

…and then it was turned over to a copy editor whose superior knowledge of where to put commas and other sorts of grammatical, syntactical, spelling and punctuation stuff made everything read correctly…

…what you end up with is something that at the very least is readable and at the very best is brilliant.

The important thing to keep in mind is this:

All first drafts are garbage.

The point is: you’ve got to give yourself permission to write garbage. And not just to write it, but to roll around in it — and then use it to write something better. The most experienced writers know that it is a process. They know that the ugly first draft that makes them cringe is really just a prince disguised as a frog. All it needs is belief by the writer in its potential, and some loving attention to help it blossom into its true loveliness.

So, the next time you feel like hitting the delete key on your draft, instead, be kind to it and yourself, knowing that what you really wanted to say is just a revision — or two or three — away.

April 4, 2011 at 1:47 pm | Fiction Advice, The Writing Life, Writing Advice | No comment

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