Every writer I know above a certain level of experience has the same relationship with the first draft. They expect it to be bad. They write it anyway. They finish it before they judge it. They put it away for a day. They come back and edit.
Every writer I know below a certain level of experience has the opposite relationship. They expect the first draft to be good. When it is not good, they stop. They doubt themselves. They start over. They try to make it good on the first pass. They do not finish.
The gap between these two groups is the gap between writers who publish and writers who do not.
Why the bad first draft matters
A first draft is not a rehearsal for the real thing. It is a discovery mechanism. You do not know what your chapter is about until you have written a draft of it. The draft is how you find out. Waiting until you know what the chapter is about before you start writing is like waiting until you know the recipe before you go to the market. You cannot know the recipe until you have seen what is in the market.
What the bad first draft is for
Three things. First, to find out what your material actually is. Half the time the anecdote you thought was central turns out to be a diversion. Half the time the sentence you thought was throwaway turns out to be the spine of the chapter. You cannot see this until you write the draft.
Second, to find out where the chapter ends. Endings are almost never where you thought they would be. The bad first draft overshoots. The good second draft trims back to where the chapter actually stops.
Third, to write yourself out of the tone you were going to write in. Almost every writer starts a memoir chapter in the wrong tone. The bad first draft reveals it. The second draft corrects it.
How to write a bad first draft on purpose
Set a timer. Ninety minutes. Do not stop. Do not edit. Do not check spelling. Do not go back to fix a sentence. When you get stuck, write, I do not know how to say this, and keep going. When the timer goes off, save the file. Close the laptop. Do something else.
The bad first draft is not the enemy of the good book. It is the material the good book is made of. Write it badly. Write it fast. Trust the second draft to be the real one.
Comments (5)
Simple and true.
Ninety minutes. Timer. Do not stop. Doing this tomorrow morning.
Almost every memoir chapter starts in the wrong tone. The bad first draft reveals it. Correct and worth taping to the wall.
I do not know how to say this, and keep going. Have been doing this for months without knowing there was a name for it.
The bad first draft as a discovery mechanism. This is how I think about engineering prototypes too. Same principle.