The Benefits of Banging Out a Shitty First Draft
The shittier, the better.
You’ve all heard about the importance of a shitty first draft, a term made famous by Anne Lamott in her bible of a craft book, Bird by Bird. She writes in her chapter “Shitty First Drafts,” “In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really, shitty first drafts.” Allison K. Williams, in her craft book, Seven Drafts, calls the first draft the “vomit draft,” emphasizing the need to get the words out, no matter how messy they appear on the page. Less crass, Matt Bell, in Refuse to be Done, refers to this draft as an exploratory draft and encourages an organic and playful approach to the 100,000 or so words you generate on the page. All three agree, and no one argues with them, that completing an initial draft—not starting it, but finishing it—is the only way to begin truly understanding your story, the most necessary step to eventually arrive at the beautifully polished draft you dream about.
“You can’t revise a blank page,” I tell my writers and attribute the quote to myself, although apparently author Jodi Picoult made the line famous.
Here’s what I want to add: The shittier the first draft, the better. Why? Because the more whole-heartedly you embrace bad writing, the freer you feel. The freer you feel, the more words you generate—because there’s no expectation that any of those words will be any good. Also, you’re setting yourself up to write a much better second draft, which will make you feel smarter and more motivated. Win win!
The good writer exists within you always. For the first draft, give her a break. She’ll take over to do her part later on.
To write the first shitty draft of my novel, I set a word-count goal to reach every weekday morning for an entire summer. I wrote 1,500 words a day. If you do this 5 days a week for 3 months, you’ll end up with between 90,000 and 100,000 words. When you write badly, this is not exceedingly tough. (Caveat: I did go into the summer with story outline. Recommend!) When you allow yourself to write super badly, it’s actually kind of fun. At one point, on page 195 of my shitty first draft, I wanted to write what a group of young men smelled like when they entered a party together. In the moment I was writing, I couldn’t decide what scent or combination of scents would be the most accurate. Rather than get hung up on that detail, I wrote all the scents that came to mind: They are in dress shoes and their hair is slicked back with jars of gel and they smell of wood, tobacco, sage, amber, and citrus. Not only did I keep my momentum going by writing a terrible sentence listing 5 different scents, I moved myself closer to my word-count goal for the day! If this sentence remains in future drafts, if it is not tossed out along the way, it will not be difficult to revise.
When my shitty draft was done, I printed it out and bound it in a massive 3-inch, 3-ring binder. With a red pen in hand, I read through it once. Here are some of the comments I scribbled on the first 35 pages:
This isn’t bad.
NEED SCENE.
I like this but too wordy.
Short chapter—absolutely nothing happens.
Who cares—No.
Oh, okay, are you starting the novel here—yet?
I am so bored.
This is nice.
Not here + not this.
All bad.
Change.
I like this.
Yes yes yes.
Tense tense tense.
Interesting…
Few bits to save here—or actually none @ all
Huh what?
I don’t care about any of this.
Well, all very poor.
After I marked up the shitty draft in red pen, with only the most cursory notes, I closed the binder. After waaaaaaaay too much time (to be addressed in another blog post) and a bunch of note-taking to rework, reshape, and refine the story (also to be talked about in another post), I opened a brand new document and started my much less shitty, much improved, still not awesome, second draft.