When I was 14 years old my mother began teaching creative writing workshops out of our house. I recall sitting on the stairs, just out of sight, listening to her students passionately discussing their projects.
Though I can’t remember any of them today I do remember the props my mother was such a dab hand at creating for those workshops: booklets to help a writer improve their descriptions, spinning wheels to aid in scene setting and crafting life-like emotions, timelines useful for plotting, and of course, my personal favorite, motivational bookmarks threaded through with shiny red ribbons.
It’s those bookmarks I remember most, not only because I was often tasked with helping to trim and laminate them but because they had memorable writing tips or quotes printed on them, things that at my young age seemed immensely clever:
Write a page a day and you’ll have a book in a year.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
Write a shitty first draft.
Though they’ve all resonated at various times in my writing life, that last one—write a shitty first draft—has pursued me doggedly, perhaps even chewed out a special place in my brain where it can nestle.
To my young ears “write a shitty first draft” sounded rebellious. In university, it was an excuse. As I got older, a cure for not getting started. It just helped me write, usually marketing plans but often, nonfiction articles or blog posts. And that’s kind of the point. The goal of the saying is to nip perfectionism in the bud—the very thing that stops writers writing—in order to get them to place words on the page.
It wasn’t until I began working on a new novel after a long hiatus from fiction writing that I realized the advice wasn’t enough. I was already writing a shitty first draft and even then still getting stuck.
I had made the mistake of going back to read through some of the writing I was doing at age 19, back when words flowed, when creativity felt boundless, and when I had every confidence I was secretly the next J. K. Rowling. It was good. Depressingly so. Much better than what I was doing now. How, after twenty years of writing practice (admittedly all nonfiction) had my style got worse, my ability to imagine and ideate so stagnated? Surely time improved one’s skill?
There isn’t anything more depressing than feeling you’ve squandered twenty years of practice. And so, after diverting my depression into reading and setting up a new site (this one), I found myself right back in front of my computer, staring blankly at the panel of neatly mapped out scenes in my Scrivener instance. Alongside it, in the writing pane, the cursor blinked steadily, waiting, and my fingers hovered above the keyboard, wrists starting to ache for the bend that didn’t seat my fingers on the keys.
The insidious little voice in my head was telling me I wasn’t any good at writing. I was rusty. Old. Jaded. I still wanted too badly to see a velvety sentence unfurl behind my cursor. Not even the flea-bitten rug of words I willed into existence helped me progress.
What if writing a shitty first draft wasn’t advice enough?
I glared at the post-it note stuck to the jar of pens on my desk and it belched, scowled back at me and said, “What?” aggressively, its large teeth chomping, readying for confrontation.
Unwilling to humor it, or get into a nasty fight, I tugged it loose and underlined the word shitty.
What if the advice hadn’t penetrated because my version of shitty wasn’t shitty enough? What if what I actually needed to do was aspire to all new levels of low?
After all, my story wasn’t progressing and I was stuck in writer’s block prison. Rather than writing, I’d slipped into researching. Perhaps if I knew what the ship my character was supposed to be entering looked like, I’d have a better chance of making progress. I investigated war ships and research vessels. I tried to smash them together and submerge them 80 feet below seawater. Of course, the joke was on me as even once I’d figured that bit out, I couldn’t get my protagonist to enter the damn thing. I began overthinking psychic distance (I’d done research on that too), worrying about integrating enough of a feeling of fantasy and gritty dystopia, and concerning myself with remaining accurate to a ship’s innards fifty years after it had been submerged. Suffice to say, I was already writing pretty shittily.
After a week of grappling with this one scene, I acted out of frustration. I had my character simply fin forward, grab the edge of a rusty hold and pull her way into a nameless passage that twisted this way, then that, nevermind that this is not how a cargo hold opens up.
I put fingers to keyboard and I jettisoned her into the engine room drenched as it was with yellow silt, far enough down that I’d have to do something different. I continued to write sentences and sentence fragments that had no business seeing the light of day and within an hour, I had completed a scene, had even set up the next one.
It was a breakthrough, the likes of which I haven’t had since I discovered how character arc can expedite plotting. As I contemplated the revelation over cup after cup of tea, I thought I might just be able to finish Act 1, at least if I could shut my thinking down long enough to put words to the page.
While some writers might find “write a shitty first draft” helpful enough advice, I needed an extra push. A reminder that it doesn’t matter what the words look like, what POV they’re in, what tense. It doesn’t even matter if they send the plot off on a tangent. All that matters is that they appear. Because, the truth is, if enough of them appear, the story somehow finds a way to move forward.
Today the post-it note on my desk is a little different.
Shit out words. That is all.
