I wrote my first book when I was seventeen. It was good… And yet, it was simultaneously terrible. The concept, the characters, the twists… they were all there. I put it together just right…
Yet, why was it so bad? Why did I go back and re-write it not once, not twice, not three times, but four?
Anne Lamott says it best: “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled.”
She coined the term “SFD” in her book, Bird by Bird. I’ve attached a link to a small portion of her book where she explains more in-depth what SFD really is: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf
That novel I wrote at seventeen, cornered in my room during the pandemic, was raw. It was emotional. It was a “child’s draft,” as Lamott would call it, “where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.”
Think about it, why would you write your first draft like it’s your last? Try to write an entire book without stopping to edit. Without scratching through lines, X’ing out words, changing dialogue, or hair color, or setting or timelines. Without going back to the last chapter to refer to the next. Without completely erasing a paragraph because of the run-on sentences and the number of times you repeated the words “because,” “he,” or “I.”
Trust your process. Write the lines that should be too long. Write the dialogue with the repeated words. Write the characters without many details, or even too many. Just write.
Get it all out there, because that will be your most vulnerable part. Let your childlike voice channel whatever visions emerge onto the page. If your childlike voice wants to be weepy, talkative, and beat the same bush over and over, let it.
You’ll soon learn to see what parts of the story are important to you. The ones that stick. The ones that show up more than once. The characters that have a death-grip on you. The setting where you can almost feel yourself inside.
Plus, the first drafts don’t matter. Well, they do, but not in the way you expect. Just get it all out there. Don’t go back and fix what you just wrote. Don’t go back and question yourself. Don’t doubt your creative liberties, and please don’t doubt whether or not you can do