The Devil on Your Shoulder
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Let yourself write slowly sometimes
Every semester since I started teaching, I have set Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” to my freshman writers in our first week of class. She makes so many good points that I think every writer should hear: that no first draft is perfect (even the ones professionals write) and that it’s okay to make a mess the first time round. The advice is sound, and much needed in a world that romanticises effortlessness. Because that pressure to exude the impression of spontaneous authenticity invades our writing time alongside every other aspect of our lives. But when it comes to adopting this shitty-first-draft mentality to all of our writing all of the time, I’ve been wondering recently if we haven’t overdone it a bit.
In one of my writing groups this last month, for example, a writer voiced a worry that the scene she was working on wasn’t really capturing the atmosphere she wanted it to. Our knee-jerk reactions were fairly unanimous. “It’s only a first draft; it doesn’t have to be perfect,” and “just keep writing and it’ll work itself out.” All of that is true to an extent. I’m sure that the fact we’ve all heard and internalised this wisdom is a net positive. After we had talked for a bit longer though, I began to feel that what we were offering was only one part wisdom to several parts platitude.
It’s natural, of course, to want to be encouraging. And sometimes our doubts about our first drafts really do come from a place of insecurity, or a pathological need to do everything just right the first time around. But in telling one another to shut down those feelings, I think we’re sometimes shutting down legitimate concerns.
We’ve been taught to call that little voice that crops up and makes quibbles with what we’re writing “perfectionism” and not to listen to it. But by brushing off our instincts as insecurities, we’re ignoring what could also be expertise. Something that tells us if our first draft isn’t setting us up for success in subsequent ones. While the ideal first draft definitely isn’t a polished one, there’s value in creating something here that we can hold onto. Perhaps those flashes of inspiration come to us naturally as we charge through the scenes, typing at top speed, but perhaps they don’t. At those times, that little voice that says we should pause and think again is worth listening to.
The example I’ll give is of character descriptions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say that you can’t know a character until you’ve gone through the plot with them — dropped them into scenes and seen how they react. But I’ve also gone through whole drafts of novels with characters who were no less two-dimensional by the end than they were when I picked their names out of the baby-name book. And that’s something I might have avoided if I had taken a little more time over the scene in which I introduced them.
When it comes to fiction, the shitty-first-draft mentality often sounds like this: “The first draft is just for getting the plot down. Fine-tuning your sentences will be a waste of time when you inevitably have to move things around and cut some scenes out. Not until the final draft should you worry about making your writing sound good.” In fact, we’re often made to feel that if we even open a thesaurus before draft three, then we’re amateurs who have let our pride and insecurities get the better of us.
Now, I admit that there is some sense in that approach. After all, trying to think about plot and character and setting and pacing and prose all at the same time is overwhelming. The part of me that needs to organise her week into colour-coded segments of time really wants to believe that if I follow the steps and write a series of drafts that focus on one thing at a time, I can create something amazing just by being diligent.
Because here’s the catch — in defining a nuanced personality or a physical description that doesn’t rely on stereotype, nothing replaces a few carefully-chosen words. These are the tools of our trade after all. We might have a page of notes on a character’s backstory and the traits we hope to get across, but translating this meta-level stuff into the language of the manuscript is where the magic happens. This is when the character comes to life.
Unfortunately, this means that writing a first draft is overwhelming because we’re trying to do so much at once. But I don’t think there’s any way of getting around that. Trying to make the process simpler than it is only results, in my experience, in two-dimensional characters and predictable plots.
Characters can’t be separated from the words in which we describe them, or from the words that they use either. So it’s worth spending some time really trying to understand how someone speaks by giving them a few well-written lines of dialogue in the first instance. If I can get into a character’s voice, I find the rest of the draft flows much more easily. Alternatively, if I speed through it assuming that I can just make the dialogue sound pretty later, I’m never going to get a sense of who that character really is until the final draft. That’s much too late, because who a character is often has major impacts on the plot.
Yes, the scene where I introduce this character might get cut if (or rather when) my plot structure changes later, and spending hours and hours carefully crafting every aspect of the scene might be a waste of time. But those few sentences that define who that character is for me will never be wasted. I don’t lose my sense of who they are even if I take the words themselves out eventually. In writing these introductory scenes, we clothe the skeletons of our characters with the flesh of words, and put breath in their bodies. Otherwise, they remain emaciated and lifeless.
The same is true of other aspects of writing. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about stories as though they have souls of their own, which we as writers only channel. If we respect the story and tend to it diligently, it will grace us with inspiration, but if we neglect it, it will leave us for someone else. In other words, a manuscript either has a soul or it doesn’t. I’ll admit that this idea is a little much for my atheist brain to swallow. But I do think that both stories and characters do have something that looks very like a soul, even if it isn’t an actual spiritual entity that can move around in the world. This “soul,” I think, is made of words: unique ones, surprising ones, carefully-selected ones. And I have observed for myself that if that soul isn’t there in the first draft then no number of chest compressions is going to resuscitate that poor devil.
No, we don’t always feel inspired, and yes, it’s still worth writing on those days when our muses desert us. Tools like NaNoWriMo are invaluable in this effort. (For anyone who doesn’t know, NaNoWriMo is a month-long challenge in which we’re told to shut down our “inner editor” and focus on speed and word-count for 30 days, aiming to write 50,000 words by the end of November.) I love doing it, not just for the community and the sense of achievement when I hit that 50k mark, but also because I know that the skill of writing quickly is a valuable one to have in my toolbox. That’s because, between those moments where we get to know a character for the first time or distill an important theme in the story, there’s a lot of stuff that really doesn’t need to be perfect, at least not the first time round. But I do find that the only years I can make use of the challenge are those when I have a bit of extra time on my hands. While it feels great to knock out 500 words in a sprint, I also need moments where I slow down to craft the bits that matter.
Writing this post has admittedly conjured up in my mind the image of myself as the demon on some poor writer’s shoulder, whispering invectives as an angelic version of Anne Lamott sits on the other shoulder, trying desperately to keep the writer’s spirits up. But I’m not here to tell you that yes, you were right, your whole project really is a waste of time and that you’re a terrible writer if you didn’t produce solid gold the first time round.
So let me advocate for a balanced view. The expectation that a first draft will be perfect is usually not a helpful one, and trying to make it perfect usually leads to a frustrating cycle of micro-edits that only keep you from moving forward. That said, I’ve never found a truly shitty first draft very helpful either. My ideal first draft has some messy bits in it, of course, bits that I wouldn’t want anyone to read. But it also contains some really good bits, characterisations, descriptions or lines of dialogue that I’m excited about — that make me want to write the next draft and bring the rest of the manuscript up to that level. Those elements give me something to hold onto while I’m trudging through the editing process: something that defines what the manuscript wants to be. And these are usually the bits that I’ve written slowly and carefully.
So the next time I hear those well-meant words of advice, I’m going to take them with a pinch of salt. I’m learning to leave space for my doubts about my work rather than dismissing them as baseless anxieties. To be clear, I do have my fair share worries about my writing that probably do come from a problem of self-esteem, but sometimes being told that we’re insecure — rather than intuitive say — just gives us insecurities about our insecurities. If we start thinking of ourselves of insecure writers just because we recognise the shortcomings of our own work, we’ll never be able to trust our instincts at all. So don’t second guess your second guesses. When your instinct tells you that a story or a character isn’t what you want it to be, I give you permission to take some time over a few sentences that give you something to hold onto as you move forward.
