The Messy Art of Sowing Seeds: On First Drafts
Hello, fellow gardeners of words!
We've talked a lot about crafting beautiful prose and digging into deep character wounds. But what about the very beginning? What about that first, chaotic rush of getting an idea onto the page?
I want to address something crucial, something many of us overlook in our pursuit of perfection: First drafts are meant to be messy.
First off, as a recovering perfectionist myself, I recommend aiming for imperfectly perfect instead of perfection. Also, remember that first drafts are meant to be the raw, unkempt soil where you scatter all your seeds. You are not building a masterpiece here; what you're doing is simply getting the materials you need to craft your new stunning project out of the bag.
Your first draft is about getting it all on the page.
Give yourself permission to be terrible. Give yourself permission to have plot holes the size of craters. Give yourself permission to write sentences that you know, deep in your soul, are clunky and awful. Because that is the whole point of a first draft.
The point isn't to be a good writer; the point is to be a writer who finishes.
And here’s a secret about the first draft: telling is not only okay, it's a powerful tool.
We spend so much time hearing "show, don't tell," but that advice is for a much later stage of many rounds of edits. In the first draft, you need to tell yourself the story before you can show it to anyone else. It's the stage for exposition, for notes, for outlining in prose.
You can literally write things like, "The character is sad here because..." or "I need to figure out why he did that later."
The only goal is to make it to the end. To have a full story, no matter how rough it looks, and that you can later look at it and say, "Okay, now I have something to work with here."
The hard, beautiful work of polishing and shaping comes later, in that stage of many rounds of edits mentioned earlier, but only once the raw material has been all there, scattered onto the page.
So let go of the pressure.
Stop trying to make your garden beautiful on the first day. Just get the soil tilled, scatter your seeds, and trust that the real growth will come with time and care.
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