First drafts are meant to suck.
That’s why they are first and that’s why they are drafts. Evaluating the quality of your writing by the quality of your first drafts will inevitably lead to you never getting anywhere because you’ll stop too early.
For example, the famous opening voice-over of Star Trek people all around the globe know is
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!
but according to a rough draft from August 2nd, 1966, it started as a way less exciting version of
This is the story of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds and civilizations. These are its voyages… and its adventures.
Sidenote
In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott writes about shitty first drafts:
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, 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. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it.
Jeff Goins explored Lamott’s advice a bit more in his article Write Less, Not More: How to Slice and Dice Your Content. He summarises:
So here’s what you need to do:
- Commit to writing. Something, anything. Maybe it’s just a sentence or the title to your next blog post. But get it down. Don’t worry about quality or even quantity. Just write.
- Write to get it out of your brain and onto paper (or screen). Do it now.
- Start slicing and dicing, cutting and chopping until what you have looks nothing like what you started with. But that’s okay because what you started with was a really bad first draft.
Whether it’s about “blank page syndrome”, perfectionism or something else, starting can be difficult if you expect the first version to be a masterpiece. Start with something — anything — and then keep iterating to make it better.
Great outcomes are not born in vacuum but formed through iteration, editing, polishing and testing ideas.
If you’d get stuck, slam down a TK to free yourself from having to come up something profound in the moment and move on. You will come back to it later anyway so freeing yourself to skip things to keep the flow going is a rather helpful model.