The Writing Life #6: Sh*tty First Drafts

Perfect Is The Enemy of ...Well, Everything

The fastest way to signal you’re not serious about the craft of writing is to confess you’ve never read Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. It — along with a few others — are REQUIRED READING for writers. Central to Lamott’s work is learning to embrace what she calls your “shitty first draft.”

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.

Writing is not what readers and aspiring writers think it is. Writing is re-writing, and then re-writing again. Of her process, Lamott writes.