Self-Publishing School Part 4: The First Draft

I love the process of writing a first draft, but it works best when I approach it with the right mindset. You see, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, I tell myself, but for much of my adult life that attitude kept me from writing at all. It's pretty much impossible to develop perfectly formed content in your mind and then spew it forth in flowing and beautiful sentences onto the blank page, but that didn't stop me from making the attempt. It would probably have been better if I had failed every single time, but I didn't. Sometimes I really would produce something worthy and beautiful, but eventually the pressure would cause me to seize up. The end result was that I never finished anything.

A few years ago I developed a new mindset, and that's when I started publishing books.

I decided that instead of trying to save the world with my writing, I would just write whatever came to me. I'd make an effort to organize my thoughts, and I'd begin with a topic in mind, but the quantity of my writing took precedence over the quality. All of the grammar and spelling errors, jarring direction changes and general sloppiness of my ideas could be massaged in later phases. In the beginning, in draft mode, I just had one job: get words out of my head and onto the page.

Letting go of the need to perpetually proffer perfect prose freed me from the creative prison I'd unknowingly built for myself. I realize now that my teachers had been trying to encourage me all along to start with slop and fix it later, but I never quite believed them. After all, these were the same people who wanted me to show my work for a math problem I could solve in my head in a fraction of a second. I also realized that creating the first draft is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the writing process. Like brainstorming, it requires suspension of judgment. Ideas can be evaluated later; for now, we're just trying to get them out of our heads.

The first draft can actually be the most enjoyable part of creating, if you allow it to be. Even if you are thinking in the back of your mind "this is absolutely no good," stepping back for a day or two after the draft is completed may change your perspective. You might find that you've produced something of value, something worthy of taking to the next level. Or you might not, and then you are free to move on. Either way, you've grown as a writer and you've learned something. There's absolutely no way to lose in this process: you succeed, or you learn. Those are the only two options. Either of them will get you closer to being the writer you want to be.