Drafting - Write First

I’ll be honest—I hate writing first drafts.

The reason? They’re not pretty.

When I draft new works, I spend most of the time staring at my blinking cursor and a blank computer screen. I feel like my ideas stifle and sputter even before I write them out. I’ll go back and highlight and delete sentences, move sentences around, [put things in brackets to develop later]. I’ll write a crass version of my message. Half the time, I remain unhappy with how illogical and scattered my ideas are.

In short, first drafts are a lot of work that nobody but me ends up looking at. I hate how I feel as I write them—I don’t feel eloquent; I don’t feel together, and I certainly don’t feel smart.

I’m in good company. In the essay “Shitty First Drafts,” writer Anne Lamott poignantly describes the writer’s plagues that she experiences as she drafts new pieces of writing: doubt, fear, imposter syndrome, and inner editors, to name a few. The following paragraph is my favorite:

The whole [first draft] would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I’d worry that people would read what I’d written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot.

For Lamott, this wasn’t just how she felt the first time she sat down to write. This was how she felt every time she sat down to write the first draft of a food review— every month, she would go through the same emotional roller coaster when that particular piece of writing was expected by the magazine.

So, now that we’ve established that first drafts are often uninspiring to write, and even experienced writers hate writing first drafts, what are some things we can do to motivate ourselves to sit down and write them? Here are three permissions that I give myself when I write first drafts. I give these permissions to you as well.

Write first

I’m already busy. As a freelance academic, I hold multiple part-time teaching positions at area colleges and universities. I’m always hustling for another gig. Plus, I like sleep and making time to hang out with friends. I also care about my writing.

I don’t get paid for my academic writing. Certainly, producing writing gives me street cred as a writing instructor and keeps my wells of empathy for student writers filled, but my writing doesn’t immediately hinge on my job performance or job promotion. I write academic articles, but those don’t pay. I write book reviews and get a free book (not a bad exchange), but not cash.  So, I have to prioritize my writing for myself if I want to get it done.

So I write first.

One beauty about working multiple jobs is I can usually set my availability. So, I simply decided that I wasn’t available in the mornings. Instead, I dedicate my mornings—my peak brainwork times—to my own writing, not everyone else’s writing. I had to decide not to feel guilty about this decision. It helped that I realized giving myself permission to write first improved my attitude towards the student writers I work with. I found that, if I had spent an entire morning revising my draft of a chapter on music in the Himalayas for an academic handbook, then I was much more patient at 8PM at night with the sophomore music student who was totally confounded over how to write a “critical analysis” of an article on 17th century opera for his music lit class when he had only been just introduced to the subject last week. 

Maybe you’re not a morning person, so maybe literally writing as your first daily activity doesn’t work for you. That’s ok. My point is for you to discover when your most creative time is and dedicate that time, without guilt, to your own writing.

Write often

One of the easiest ways to face the fear of writing is to just show up often to write.

Unfortunately, nobody has been able to turn thinking about writing or planning to write or intending to write into actual writing without sitting down to, well, write. So while I think about what I want to say on neighborhood walks or while cleaning my house (I call these my pre-writing rituals), I have to actually commit those words to paper. It is easier to do so if I have actually set aside time in my day or week to write. My mornings are set aside for my own writing, but I have to actually do what I said I was going to do—sit and write. It helps if I have a game plan when I sit down. So, I calendar my writing projects just like I would any other project.

At the moment, my academic writing projects include a chapter for a handbook, a fellowship proposal, two conference abstracts, and a book proposal. I had dedicated Monday mornings to abstracts, Tuesday mornings (and a slot in the afternoon) to the fellowship and book proposal (because they were linked to the same project), and Wednesday mornings to the handbook chapter. Both conferences just got postponed due to the current pandemic, so the abstract due dates have subsequently been pushed back. I just received an actual due date for the chapter handbook—which is slightly sooner than I anticipated. How much time I calendar for these projects has subsequently pivoted: the conference abstracts have naturally been dropped for now and the time I had dedicated to them is now given over to the handbook chapter. And closer to the due date, I may allocate Thursday or Friday mornings to more handbook chapter finessing time instead of writing these blog posts. But once the chapter is submitted, I can go back to writing conference abstracts and blog posts.

Even with a game plan, not all of my writing sessions are equally productive. I’ve had several sessions where I feel like I got nothing done or didn’t make the right writing decisions, so in my next session, I undid what I had done previously. Other sessions have been much more productive. But it all evens out when I can submit a polished piece of writing by a deadline.

Write messy

As I’ve already expressed, my first drafts aren’t pretty. One reason those first drafts are so messy is because my ideas often run ahead of my writing. To keep up with my thoughts, I will pepper my first drafts with placeholders. I like to use [square brackets]. Inside those brackets are usually direct notes about what I will write: [include reference to jhyaure article here][talk about how some kinds of writing are easier than others]. At other times, they contain a crass version of my message: [this dude freakin’ calls out bigotry clothed as detached, critical thought!].

As you can see, at this point in the writing process, I don’t edit any ideas—I just get them down first. Once they’re out of my head and on paper (or typed into my Microsoft Word document), I can evaluate them. Some call this “writing without a backspace” or “writing without your inner critic.”

So give yourself permission to write first, write often, and write messy—because drafting is not the end of the writing process. We’ll talk about what to do with that glorious writerly mess in the next blog post.