Always Write Terrible First Drafts

The Skeleton: A Terrible First Draft

At least when it comes to fiction, I write the worst first drafts, and I know I’m not the only one. In Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott says that her first drafts are so bad she worries about getting into a car crash and dying…because she’d never want others to see her stuff before she’s had a chance to revise it. 

Whether you’re an outliner or a pantser, things are still going to flow differently once you start writing, and insisting on having a reasonably good first draft may cause a variety of problems. 

First, it’s important that every writer realize that a first draft is just that – a first draft. No matter how great it may have seemed while you were working on it, everything needs to be proofread and polished up over several more passes. One of the biggest mistakes I see beginning writers making is that they’re impatient with editing – they want their masterpiece out there, already. Often before it's ready.

But masterpieces not only require you to review the manuscript to work out the kinks, they also require feedback from others, who will let you know where the problems you can’t see are. And if you always consider your first draft terrible, you’re not going to be offended when others point out weak areas.

Second, if you’re snailing along trying to get everything right the first time, you may not notice places that the novel’s tension drops. That is, when I’m writing frantically to get all the ideas onto the page in some form, I really notice when everything sloooowwsss down, and I know that those are places that are going to need particular work (or they may even need to be cut completely). 

I’ve always liked that Iris Murdoch quote, “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” In other words, what ends up on the page may not capture your vision as well as you’d hoped. And if you’re spending the whole process worrying about that, you’re never going to accomplish anything.

To put this into psychological terms, if your inner critic is sitting on your shoulder tapping its pointy-nailed fingers, it’s unlikely you’re going to break into a “flow” state.  Flow, as defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes, you can pronounce that – it’s me-high chick-sent-me-high), is a state of complete involvement, elevated mood, serenity, great inner clarity, and a sense of competence. It is, in other words, that feeling you get when you’re completely immersed in a project, time is zipping by, and the words just flow. Csikszentmihalyi argues that this occurs when we have a perfect balance between our skill level and the challenge before us.  If the inner critic is worrying too much about doing things “just right” the first time, flow can’t happen. 

I think of writing a book as a layered process. I see the first draft as the skeleton. It provides a framework. Next are the tendons and muscles and organs. The stuff that makes your story (forgive me for using this word) meaty. This stage takes several passes for me, each time building another layer. Finally comes the skin, the hair, the features. This is the fine-tuning, the polishing, the part that makes your manuscript truly presentable. 

At the skeleton phase, I’m telling the story far more than I’m showing it. And I write everything – the awful melodrama I really want to put in there (but shouldn’t), conflicting information if I’m not sure exactly which way I’m going to handle something (or if things are changing as I write), the stuff we don’t want our parents to see. (Darned if that stuff doesn’t usually end up being some of the best stuff for me. But if I weren’t writing a Terrible First Draft, I’d never put it in there.) 

If I think of something important that has the potential to interrupt my single-minded creation of the Terrible First Draft, here’s what I do. Let’s say I have an idea for what I want to write tomorrow, or somewhere farther along in the story. If you have an outline, or use outlining software, you may find it easy to pop those things in with a new notecard or file. But if you don’t know where the idea goes, or you don’t want to stop long enough to go back to your plotting board, you can always write the idea right in the first draft. I usually write these pieces in ALL CAPS (I started doing that in my manuscripts before that was known as shouting) or in italics. They just go in there wherever they occurred to me, single-spaced to make them stand out, and then I plunge right back into the story.

Later I might move the idea into a writing program like yWriter so I can play with it some more, but when I’m writing, I’m writing.

So don’t be afraid to write Terrible First Drafts. I know if I didn’t, I’d miss out on a lot of great possibilities. Plus I’d be too paralyzed to get much done in the first place. 

If you’ve never tried writing a Terrible First Draft, you might want to try NaNoWriMo, which starts November first. Writing 50,000 words (or more) in a month is one way to shut off the worry about producing something Good the first time. There’s no time to worry – only to write!

So how about you? Do you write Terrible First Drafts? What are the benefits you’ve discovered?

Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD's book, THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment, and Human Behavior helps writers avoid common misconceptions and inaccuracies and "get the psych right" in their stories. You can learn more about The Writer's Guide to Psychology, check out Dr. K's blog on Psychology Today, or follow her on Facebook! 

Thinking Outside the Computer: Longhand and the Brain

Sometimes the ideas just flow better longhand.

In Indiana, schools are no longer required to teach cursive writing. The emphasis, instead, is on typing skills. I keep wondering if this approach will cut off an important route to creative thinking. Of course, students will still be taught to print, but most people will attest that it is much quicker to write in cursive than it is to print each individual letter. (There also seems to be more acceptance of messy script than messy print, which reduces concerns about “getting it to look right.”) Granted, in the computer age many of us can type even faster than we can write in cursive, but is speed the most important factor here?

When I’m brainstorming on a project, I find I think much better when I write by hand than when I try to type things out on a computer. I just feel more creative. It’s much easier to write in the margins, to draw lines out to new thoughts, or even to draw little sketches just because they help me think. The keyboard doesn’t let me do that.

For me, the shift away from precisely-shaped individual letters can actually increase the fluidity of my thoughts and my ability to enter what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls a “flow” state – basically, he means that state of complete absorption and euphoria where you’re “hot” or “in the zone.” The world drops away and you're just writing really good stuff.

Also – ideas often strike me in inconvenient places. In the car, for example, or in the shower.  It’s a lot easier to scribble down an idea on a scrap of paper with one hand (I am never without a handy pen!) than it is to fumble out my phone or some other technological device, open an app that will let me record, and try to type it in.

When I have the time to sit down and focus, I do like using a computer or digital tablet to brainstorm.

I have an old tablet PC, and it records my handwriting faithfully, which is important to me (and sometimes crucial given how messy things get – I have a personal cursive shorthand). I’m still on the fence with the iPad, both because I have to think constantly about keeping my hand off the screen (which may just take more practice – I am borrowing a friend’s) and because most available apps don’t reproduce my scrawl faithfully. (The one that seems to come closest is Penultimate.) And I’m still getting used to the idea of writing with a (shudder) squishy pen. And then there’s the size of the iPad itself – the page size feels like a constraint to me, at least in the Penultimate app. I’ve found that I can push OneNote on my old tablet PC to scroll down and to the side when I need more room, which I always do. (I’m really interested in any input others have on using technologies with handwriting, so please feel free to comment below.)

In any case, I was curious about whether there was any research to back up my feeling that I’m more creative when I’m writing longhand. After a quick search, here’s what I found: one set of neuropsychologists discovered that dealing with handwriting seems to engage the right brain better; another neurologist argues that writing in cursive actually “stimulate[s] brain activity, lead[ing] to increased language fluency.”

Now, before you get too excited about that right-brain reference, do realize that even theorists who argue the importance of right-brain activity in creativity typically emphasize the use of both sides of the brain together. In her amazing book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, for example, neuroscientist and writer Alice Flaherty says, “creativity requires not just more right hemisphere activity, but a balanced interaction between the right and left hemispheres.” In other words, the balance created by relatively increased right-hemisphere activity is what’s notable in someone who’s thinking creatively. (This makes particular sense for writing, since in most people, language is a left-hemisphere function.)

If you find yourself stuck on your project, try writing or brainstorming longhand. Don’t be afraid to scribble things out or write in the margins. It doesn’t matter whether you do it on a piece of paper with a good old-fashioned pencil or pen, or on a digital slate with handwriting capabilities. And if things are not coming in straight tidy lines, let yourself stop worrying about precise lines of text and try a blank, unlined page so you can write in bursts, connecting things as needed with lines, drawings, and added notes.

And then let me know what happens!

Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD's book, THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment, and Human Behavior helps writers avoid common misconceptions and inaccuracies and "get the psych right" in their stories. You can learn more about The Writer's Guide to Psychology, check out Dr. K's blog on Psychology Today, or follow her on Facebook or Google+!