“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

There’s a reason why so many have written about the first attempts at writing a book, an article, a thesis, anything really. It’s messy and it takes time. And if it isn’t messy, it takes even more time.

The first draft means silencing perfectionism and slamming the door on that annoying straight-A student in your head. Otherwise you end up doing what I did just last night and spend nearly an hour agonising over one sentence that is very much in danger of being scrapped during later edits and rewrites. It’s not easy to quiet that inner critic while trying to get a rough version of the story down on paper. The risk, however, is that the finishing point moves so far into the horizon that it eventually falls off the end of the world. Not to mention the fact that the initial excitement of telling the story tends to fade when the process seems to keep bumping up against and stumbling over problems that could be solved later on.

Patience and kindness are what are needed. Patience, because many problems and issues can be dealt with later. Do you really need the perfect word to describe the particular shade of green of a character’s eyes right now? Probably not. And kindness, because bad writing in a first draft does not make anyone a bad writer. It’s the final draft that counts. No one ever needs to see those initial tries. Those are just for you, the writer.

I love this quote often attributed to Terry Pratchett: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” It sounds simple and perhaps that’s exactly how it should be. Tell yourself the story, get it down on paper and deal with all those cliches, wrongly chosen words, grammatical errors and other niggles later. They can wait, the story cannot.