first-drafts

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.

Awful first drafts are fine__gree with this.If you don__ finish something, you__l never get in the game. Just quell the voice in your head that says __re you kidding? No one is going to want to read this drivel_ and keep on going. You__e going to revise and revise and then revise again anyway.

I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn__ give up. Then I wrote one more book.

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.--Fire Up Your Writing Brain

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.