21 Quotes About 1st Drafts

First drafts are the swamp monsters of writing. They smell weird, look worse, and if you stare too long, you’ll start questioning your career choices. But here’s the dirty little secret every writer knows (and tries to forget until deadline): you don’t get to the shiny stuff without trudging through the muck. 

Marketing copy, blog content, ad headlines ... it all starts as a mess. And that’s fine. Better than fine, actually. Because without that shaky, ugly first draft, there’s nothing to refine, polish, or sell.

So, in the spirit of celebrating the mess, here are 21 quotes to remind you that your first draft doesn’t have to be brilliant ... it just has to exist.

The first draft of everything is shit. – Ernest Hemingway

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles. – Shannon Hale

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist. – Jane Smiley

I just give myself permission to suck.
I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts…
so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day
I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will
stick in the minds of my readers forever,
because there’s a 90 percent chance
I’m just gonna delete whatever
I write anyway.
I find this hugely liberating.

John Green

Short copy actually takes longer to write. That’s why I go through so many drafts; because it’s a process of distillation. You start with 25 gallons of sour mash to produce a fifth of whiskey. – Jim Punkre

Sometimes my first drafts look like I was typing with hammers. – Scott Frothingham

The first draft is a skeleton. Just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising. – Judy Bloom

Never create and edit at the same time.

Get all the sloppy, ugly roughs and first drafts out.

Quantity is more important than quality at the start.

Mess is more.

Brian Collins

Most times, I’ll just sit there, suffer, write shitty sentences, and hope I can make the next draft less putrid. – Daniel Pink

The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist. – Michael Lee

Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can. – Anne Lamott

To become a proper writer, you have to forgive yourself the catastrophe of the first draft. – Alain de Botton

Because getting it all onto the page and not worrying about perfection is a super-important first step in many a creative process. You can redraft, edit and fine tune later (or ask somebody else to). Give yourself permission to write something imperfect, and then you’ve got something to work with. – Sophie de Albuquerque

Underthink. Overwrite.
The secret to a good first draft.

Joe Jeffries

When working on a first draft, go into the project knowing that 33% of what you write will be good “as is”, 33% of what you write could be good after editing, and 33% will be trash. – Soundarya Durgumahanthi 

With rare exceptions all early drafts are imperfect, but that imperfection is a gift — the raw material you need to make things better during revision. – Roy Peter Clark

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft…Until it exists, writing has not really begun. – John McPhee

Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix. – Dominick Dunne

Afraid you can’t write your first draft like
polished Hemingway prose?
Neither could Hemingway!

Daniel Parsons

Call To Action

 

Close with an outcome, not a feature.

“Choose your plan” is closing with a feature ... sounds like homework.

"Choose your 6-pack abs by summer" is closing with an outcome ... sounds like motivation.

The Union of Mess and Precision

People tell me "The magic’s in the mess. But the paycheck’s in the precision." should be my catchphrase.

Apparently I say it often.

Sometimes, however, it doesn't land the way I'd like it to. 

Sometimes, the recipient of my oft repeated observation think I'm referring to the deliverable that will be handed to the client or presented to the public. 

But, I'm not referring to the end result of the creative process: what we'll use to market a product or service.

I'm talking about what's going on in the mind of the creator: Creatives need both the "mess" and the "precision" to mold that "mess" into something that resonates with the intended audience.

To quote Dorothy Parker: "Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye."

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
New York based American poet, literary critic and writer of
fiction, plays and screenplays known for her caustic wisecracks.

Sedaris

Last night I attended “An Evening with David Sedaris.”

Without question, he's a storytelling genius. And it was a treat being in the audience as he made his stories come alive.

The majority of the performance was Sedaris reading selected stories … a stack of papers in his left hand … a pencil in his right.

“When the audience laughs, I make notes. And when the audience coughs, it’s like they’re throwing skulls at you. They’re telling you that if this was on the page, they would be skimming now. At the end of the night I’ll lay my story out on the hotel bed and look at my notes, and I’ll notice the flow of the laughter. I want there to be a rhythm to it. I want it to be like a roller coaster that the audience is strapped into.”

He didn’t say this last night … it was one of the quotes I found this morning, along with:

“The danger is writing something that just stops, instead of something that ends.”

“You need to be in the world and you need to be engaged with the world. It’s my job to collect jokes. It’s my job to collect startling images. And so when I’m out in the world, I’m at work. And I’m a professional.”

“You need to do the best that you can do, and then you need to take the best that you can do and you need to rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it.”

If he is appearing in your area, grab a ticket. You won’t be disappointed.

_________________________

David Sedaris (1956-) is an American humorist and essayist best known for his sardonic autobiographical stories and social commentary, which have appeared National Public Radio and in numerous best-selling books including “Barrel Fever” and his first New York Times Bestseller “Naked.” He has contributed over 40 essays to The New Yorker magazine and blog.