Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, has a great chapter called Shitty First Drafts that’s all about getting over those internal voices that tell writers that what we’re writing sucks. The essay is all about accepting those voices, realizing that they’re going to be there for as long as you’re doing something creative, and then doing the only thing you can do: press on. This is what I was thinking about yesterday as I wrote a new essay. It doesn’t always happen, but I would say that 80% of the time (and maybe more lately) that I’m writing something new, that feeling sneaks in and starts whispering, “This sucks. Why are you writing this? Stop already, please, you’re embarrassing yourself.”

Editing is Creative

For those of you that don’t pursue creative endeavors, then you don’t know what this is all about. The rest of you, y’all know what I’m sayin’. Yesterday I managed to push through and write on, regardless of the voices. Anyway, on my way to work I was thinking about this and how, typically, the voices win and I’ll  abandon what I’m writing — accepting that it’s crap and would never amount to anything.

For some reason I had an epiphany on my way to work. Instead of trying to convince myself that a first draft (when we first put pen to paper) is actually good at some level despite the voices, it hit me that I was looking at things the wrong way. I needed to just accept that it wasn’t any good — it was a shitty first draft. The key here is to realize how important editing (or rewriting) is in the writing process. Most people like myself think of writing (and any other creative activity) as an act of inspiration where we are touched by some magical force and whatever we produce at first sitting is tainted with this fairy dust that makes it “good.” Again, that’s the wrong way to look at it. We need to accept that editing is part of the process of writing, one that we’ll worry about later.

Writing is Like Sculpting

Writing is like digging into the ground to find some clay to work with. We want to find as much as we can, no matter what color it is, how good or bad it is, or any of that. Our first priority is to just find and collect as much as we can. Same deal with writing — just get it all out onto the page, we aren’t sculpting right now, we’re just setting it up.

The next step is the actual sculpting of the clay, which is like editing. A lot of writers don’t like to think of this stage as having any creativity — instead looking at it simply as correcting spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and shifting periods and punctuation marks. Wrong. Here is where we take everything we’ve thrown on the page and we turn it into something good/great. I like to think of it as a challenge, almost divorcing myself from what I’ve written. That’s why I like to take a week or so between the writing and the editing — a lot of times I’ll forget what I’ve written, making it feel new and fresh. Now I look at what I’ve written as a challenge: take what you’ve been given and make it good.

The Lesson

Figuring out that editing is a part of the creative process is very important because it allows you to get through that first step without letting that inner critic stop you from getting any work done. So next time you’re creating something don’t worry so much about how good it is or if anyone will like it. You’ll worry plenty about that later. For now just try to make it the Shittiest First Draft you can. Why? Because without a Shitty First Draft there is no second draft, and that means there’s no anything. And something is always better than nothing.

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