Why you need a Shitty First Draft

I am talking to a friend, a brilliant writer of narrative non-fiction. It’s nearly lunchtime, and he tells me that he has been catching up with friends, sorting out a few niggling home repairs, and going through a long-neglected box of press cuttings.

I’d been out for a long walk first thing. By the time he called, however, I was busy sorting out books I knew I’d never read again, aiming to take them down to the charity shop to make room on my shelves for the new books that were piling up on the floor of my study.

There’s a pause, then we both say it together. “So what are you avoiding working on?”

Procrastination.

We all give in to at times, and it’s not always such a bad thing. Sometimes, it’s part of the creative process.

That hour or two spent walking or cleaning, sorting and filing, is giving your mind some space to process, for the cogs to start turning. But when hours stretch into days, it’s a problem.

When you tell yourself that every Monday, every new morning is a fresh start, the moment when you really will get going, you’re pressing the pause button on life. And when your procrastination turns away from walks, or chores, or catching up with friends, and turns instead to numbing activities like endless online surfing or games, you’re really in trouble.

So how do you begin again?

How do you turn off the gremlins buzzing inside your head, telling you that it won’t be good enough, that you shouldn’t take the risk, that it really would be better if you played another round of Call of Duty, and follow up with a few re-runs of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia?

You let go of the need to be perfect. Even the greatest writers made a shitty first draft of their works. Have a look at the British Library’s archive online, and see original manuscripts by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, covered with crossings out.

What makes you think you could be better than them, straight off?

The cure: just do it.

Set a ludicrously achievable target, and begin. A page, a paragraph, a single sentence if you’re really stuck. Or just sit at your desk and type nonsense for 10 minutes.

Author Neil Gaiman has a great strategy, which he shared on the Tim Ferriss podcast. (Which is below, and well worth 90 minutes of your time.)

When he sits down to write, he gives himself two choices. He can write, or he can do nothing. By nothing, he means no reading. No calling friends. No pottering about. No playing with his young son. He has just those two options. And after a while, staring into space gets tedious, so he writes instead.

How do you use this?

Pick up your guitar for five minutes, and just let your fingers play. Do your vocal warm-ups, run through some scales, programme a basic beat, and let the music you’re making be derivative, dull, repetitive if that’s what it takes to get going.

Sooner or later, your mind will get bored, and start wandering in more interesting directions. But only if you make the bad art first.

Do a five-minute sketch, or the most basic version you can imagine of the work you want to do.

On a really bad day, that might mean sitting at your desk, in your studio, in your workshop, getting out your materials and just staring at them. That’s OK, as long as you’re not doing anything else.

After the allotted time you can stop if you want to, and enjoy the rest of the day guilt-free. Just vow to do the same again, the next day, until it becomes a consistent chain you no longer want to break.

Often, once you start, you’ll continue. Even if you don’t, you’ll get into the habit of showing up, and sooner or later the momentum will build.

At worst?

You’ll get there slowly: one bar, two stitches, three sentences, four brush-strokes at a time. Which is still far better than doing nothing at all.

Procrastination is often about fear, which can show up disguised as perfectionism.

“I can’t start this!” says one of my coaching clients. He is avoiding writing a second album after huge success with his debut. “I just don’t want to risk making something that’s awful.”

But he will make something bad.

That’s the whole point. It’s part of the process. We just tend to forget that, once we’ve finished our creative work.

When we’re young, or just starting out, there is less pressure. We rarely know how little we know. So it’s easier to get stuck in and begin.

As we get older, more skilled or successful at what we do, our standards are higher. There’s a good chance we’ve become good at some things, so it’s harder to start again with a new project, as a beginner. It’s hard to produce a shitty first draft.

We’re impatient, we think we should be good at this stuff, and be turning out quality work from the start. Which is why we are afraid to begin at all. Why risk it?

So here’s the answer, the way to really begin.

The best gift you can give yourself, when starting a new project, is permission to be terrible. The freedom to make something awful. To fail, then fail again. To take risks, take a creative leap, and then laugh when you fall flat on your face instead of flying.

Don’t try and make a good song. Write a bad one. Then another. Enjoy your Shitty First Draft. And see it as part of the process.

Don’t expect perfect prose.

Instead, open a file and label it Shitty First Draft. No one but you ever needs to read it. Just get your ideas down, and your juices flowing. Write badly. Write quickly. Just write. The editing, the polishing, can come later.

A while ago, I asked an author who had just published an exquisite debut novel how he’d managed it. He laughed, and said it was a fairly simple process. First, he wrote two terrible novels. Then a mediocre one. Then one with some good bits, that just didn’t come together.

Finally, he wrote the one that got him the big book advance. Then, after several revisions, a change of editor and a long fight over the cover artwork, he became an overnight success.

If you’re at the start of your creative journey, then you might as well get on with it. There’s a lot of bad work to get done, before you’ll reach the good bits. So stop judging yourself, and begin that Shitty First Draft.