In praise of the rough draft

The blank page is only frightening if you believe the next thing you put on it has to be good. Release that one belief and the terror drains out of the whole enterprise. The first draft is not supposed to be good. The first draft is supposed to exist.

I have come to think of the rough draft as a different job entirely from the finished piece — one done by a different, scruffier version of me who is not allowed to read what he writes. His only task is volume. Get it down. Get it wrong. Get it there, where it can finally be worked on.

You cannot edit a blank page. You can only stare at it.

Two jobs, never at once

The fatal mistake — the one that produces the staring — is trying to write and edit in the same breath. They are opposite motions. Writing is generous, fast, indiscriminate; it says yes, and. Editing is ruthless, slow, particular; it says no, cut. Run them simultaneously and they cancel out. You produce a sentence, condemn it, delete it, and produce nothing.

So separate them in time. Draft today, badly, with the editor sent out of the room. Return tomorrow, cold and merciless, and only then begin to carve.

draft()   // fast, generous, no judgement
sleep()   // let it go cold overnight
edit()    // slow, ruthless, particular

The kindness of a bad first line

There is a strange mercy in deliberately writing a bad first sentence. It sets the bar on the floor, where you can step over it. The thing about Tuesdays is that they exist. Terrible. Wonderful. The page is no longer blank, and the version of you who can fix terrible sentences is a far more capable creature than the one who was frozen before a white void.

Permission to be bad is not lowering your standards. It is the only known route to meeting them. The polish you are so anxious about comes later, reliably, to anyone willing to first make the mess that polish requires.

Write the bad draft. Then write the next one. That is the whole secret, and it is not a secret at all.