First drafts - Austin Kleon
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First drafts - Austin Kleon
all I had to do was to write a really shitty first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.
Anne Lamott • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them.
[ • Putting Ideas Into Words
“Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text genera
... See moreThe easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.
Paul Graham • Taste for Makers
A first draft is seldom appropriately shown to any but the most gentle and discerning eye. It often takes another artist to see the embryonic work that is trying to sprout. The inexperienced or harsh critical eye, instead of nurturing the shoot of art into being, may shoot it down instead.
Julia Cameron • The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
Anne Lamott • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
"Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence"
- George Saunders
(good advice in general)