Loading…
17
Hot take: if your first draft is too clean, you're probably writing too slow
Last week I watched a friend spend 45 minutes agonizing over one paragraph opening for a short story. Meanwhile I banged out 3 pages of pure garbage in the same amount of time and honestly the garbage had more life in it. We traded drafts and mine was messy as hell but had actual voice, his was polished but dead. Why does everyone treat the first pass like it needs to be perfect? Speed gives you momentum. You can fix ugly, you can't fix nothing. Anyone else feel like they do their best work when they stop self-editing mid sentence?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
claire9581mo ago
My last novel had a 200 page first draft that I wrote in two weeks, mostly at 2am with terrible coffee. The prose was a disaster, half the scenes were just dialogue with no description, and I literally wrote "something happens here" in the margins three times. But when I went back to revise, I had so much raw material to work with that the real story just appeared. My critique group read the polished version and said it felt alive, which cracked me up because the first draft read like a crazy person's notebook. Meanwhile, the guy in my writing group who takes a month per chapter turned in something so careful and correct that nobody could even remember what it was about. You can always add beauty later, but you can't fake that initial spark.
5