In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, bestselling author, Anne Lamott, has a chapter on writing bad first drafts. Actually she calls them “shitty first drafts.”
She says:
All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars . . . But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. . . .
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
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. . . . If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.
I read Bird by Bird over a decade ago, and I still think of Anne Lamott’s suggestion every time I start to write something new. What do you think? Have you written a bad first draft lately? As always, I’d love to hear from you.
P.S. News about my own book, which I fondly refer to as The Little Engine That Could: according to Amazon Bestsellers Sales Ranking, as of this week, Seeking Sara Summers is in top 2% of all BOOKS on Amazon and top 4% of all Kindle books!
P.P.S.
I am an ex-shrink who writes novels. Check out my books here.
To be honest, it kind of annoys me when anyone says, “This here is how it’s done.” Because actually, there are lots of ways to do it, and none of them are The Way. I have no doubt that there are plenty of great writers who write shitty first drafts, as Lamott says. I’m equally sure that there are great writers who write beautiful first drafts (not perfect, but beautiful).
I’m not saying that I’m a great writer, but my first drafts are fairly polished. It would not be possible for me to write a shitty draft. I would not be able to continue from chapter to chapter (or even paragraph to paragraph) if the vast majority of what I was creating was shitty. I understand and relate to my characters through my writing, so if it’s shitty, then my characters are shit. Now sometimes shitty characters are a lot of fun, but not shittily written characters, and that’s what we’re talking about here.
Again, I’m not saying my way is the right way. My point is there is no “right way.” There’s just a lot of ways, and we all get there how we get there.
PS That’s great for *Seeking Sara Summers*! It should be doing very well. It’s a very well written book, and if you tell me it came from a shitty first draft, I’ll believe you. 🙂
Yeah, I know what you mean, Sonja. There’s so much advice out there and so many books on writing. The most I’ve learned about how to write, I’ve learned by actually doing the writing.
I don’t think I write “shitty” first drafts anymore, but I certainly write unpolished ones. Mainly because I have a “no tinkering” rule until I get the first draft down. It’s basically the only “rule” I have when it comes to my writing. Not because I read it in a book about how to write, but because I know myself well enough to know that if I stop to tinker, I lose that initial creative burst.
Thanks for your congrats on Seeking. To be honest, I wrote it so long ago, I can’t even remember the first draft. 🙂
From two of my wonderful email subscribers:
“Hi Susan, I am not a writer,per se…not even close, but I adore reading. Does that count? However, I have written several drafts to compose the perfect letter to someone I love.
I am one of your readers who purchased “Seeking Sara Summers” from Amazon this month. I haven’t gotten started on it yet, but I will as soon as the Holidays are behind us. Congratulations on the ratings. M.”
And this one:
“Hi Susan,
Yes, I have written shitty first through fifth drafts. Once I abandoned the whole idea altogether because I couldn’t get on paper, what was in my head. Congratulations on your success with “Seeking Sara Summers”. I still think it’s good enough to become a screen play, and I hope it does.
Happy Solstice, T.”
Hi Susan. I want you to know you can’t imagine how much this column cheered me up, being that I’m starting on my fourth draft, which means I’m being forced to reread the others. (On an amusing side track, there’s one scene that I wrote way back in draft one, before I was even taking this whole thing very seriously, that has survived, virtually unchanged, into the present. When I was rereading it for draft three I thought of adding this new idea at the end to give it an extra kick of poignancy when I actually reached that very idea at the end–seems I’d already thought of the idea and then forgotten that I had.
I agree first drafts should explore everything. And as a result they come out shitty oftentimes. That does not mean your characters are shitty, as Sonja says. What it means (to me at least) is that you have in your head a vision of how your characters, which are just manifestations of pure abstract thought, really, manifest themselves, and the words on the paper, what the readers will connect with, don’t quite reflect that vision yet. Writing is really a two-step process: there’s the idea, the abstraction in your head, the thing that makes you jump to your keyboard and say “I want to write this story!” and then there’s the tools, all the writer’s tools, from every comma to each metaphor, that you use to get that concept into the head of the reader, the way an architect realizes a design with brick, board, nail and so on. The tough part is making that transition from one to the other, so that the idea comes through. I find in first drafts I overwrite, and even in second and third drafts I’m constantly trimming words, especially adjectives and adverbs. I don’t think I’m alone: I’m learning who my characters are too. I notice when I watch the pilot episodes of old and familiar TV shows how overdone the characters initially are. It’s because the writers themselves were discovering who Hawkeye Pierce, Archie Bunker and Homer Simpson were. That’s how first drafts function to me at least.
As Sonja points out, some writers don’t do a lot of revising. Isaac Asimov said he rarely changed a word. Unfortunately, in his case at least, I think it shows. One of my biggest challenges, and this ties into my earlier blog post about having length-quotas and why I think it’s silly, is finding just the right words to convey an experience or concept. I was reading a book by Alain de Botton recently wherein he said there are lots of words for precise concepts but fewer for emotions. He might have added that writers have tried all sorts of techniques to compensate for the maddeningly precise and limited quality of the English language: stream of consciousness, impressionistic and expressionistic writing, metaphor and simile, graphic novels, etc., as well as just the oldest trick: stuffing your writing with so many details in order to make the experience you are describing seem particular to your story and not generic. (Don’t you hate it when an author describes someone walking into a room by saying, “She walked into the room”?) I find that finding the exactly right words to get the precise shade of emotion is THE toughest part of the job, and after every draft I’m comparing what I’ve put on paper with the abstract vision in my head, and it always comes up short. Knowing when you’re not getting any closer is, I guess, knowing when to throw in the towel and say “It is what it is.” At the start of chapter two of my novel I say, “Callicoon never had the guts to be an artists’ colony.” But then I thought of saying, “Callicoon never quite had the guts to be an artists’ colony.” You wouldn’t believe how long I went back and forth trying to decide whether or not to use the word “quite” to soften it. I debated that for two days.
Oh, also meant to say congrats on your little engine. Sounds wonderfully encouraging. In fact, your whole post today cheered me to no end. Ready to go into battle today once again with draft four.
Good luck with draft four, John, and thanks, as always, for your thoughtful comments. I love hearing from all of you!