What if that first draft isn’t a dumpster fire?

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The “shitty first draft”: A shibboleth past its prime?

Your first draft is a hot mess.

A train wreck.

A dumpster fire.

Pick your image, but just know: the bad first draft is inevitable.

Be prepared! The experience of writing it is a dreadful, terrible slog, something to get through in order to access the real work. That’s what writing is.

Or so the thinking goes.

Made famous in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, the axiom of “the shitty first draft” pervades much of the received wisdom in writing circles.

There’s good reason for that.

We don’t always know what we want to say until we see it on the page. Especially if the work is ambitious or if we are tentative about its meaning, or our scope on the material, there may be multiple false notes in the initial iteration.

Not much glamour in that part, true. Also true that rewriting is an integral part of the process, that we are rarely, if ever, done after one go.

And that is often messy.

Lamott, among others, suggests, then, that writers embrace this “fact” of the “shitty first draft” in order to be free.

She recommends we consider it a place to dump everything out as a child might with their toys, strewn across the floor. Wily-nily.

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Allow yourself to detach from perfectionism, she urges. Give yourself permission for it not to work out.

The playfulness of this approach, Lamott argues, allows the adult in us to clean up our act in second and subsequent drafts.

This idea of the “shitty first draft” is meant to liberate us.

And while there is wisdom in releasing the idea that our best writing will arrive as if by magic–Athena fully formed from Zeus’s head–I wonder how this concept may create a new set of concerns around the very “problem” it was meant to resolve.

I’m certainly not the first to question this axiom. George Dila, for one, responded to this notion in “Rethinking the Shitty First Draft.”

Dila focuses on his contrary practice of measured, consistent, ongoing revision as part of the initial drafting process opposed to the “wild abandon” of Lamott’s.

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Even that, though, presumes that the work of writing is meant to fix what’s inherently broken…to clean up the mess we’ve made.

I wonder what we lose, though, when we assume our first drafts are inevitably inferior representations of our best ideas.

Might the nearly constant reiteration of its inherent inferiority ultimately discourage us from seeing what works in the first draft, what should stay moving forward?

No one wants to be one too de-lu-lu to see they are not as good as they think they are. The “shitty first draft” may offer us the illusion of protection from grandiosity, a rather unattractive occupational hazard.

But, then again, how many wonderful stories have been dumped in the bin because its author assumes that it must be bad in order for it to be legitimate? That anything good from the early work necessarily derives from self-delusion?

We’ve probably all heard by now the famous story that Stephen King threw away his manuscript for Carrie; it was his wife Tabitha who saved it from oblivion and encouraged him to build on what she noticed was already going well. King dedicates much of his work to Tabby who believed in him when he himself did not.

Of course, Carrie put Stephen King on the map; he has become one of the most prolific, popular authors today. But he needed someone to save him from the assumption his first draft was inherently unworthy.

Not everyone has a vigilant spouse plucking from the garbage our discarded gems, so what are we to do?

Questioning the validity of this blanket assumption about “shitty first drafts” is a good first step.

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Consider with me: do the risks inherent in accepting the inevitability of poor, early writing outweigh the benefits?

For isn’t it just as blinding to assume something is inherently bad as it is to assume we can achieve our greatest vision without scrupulous revision?

Even as we acknowledge the need to polish, we can still recognize what shines in our early efforts.

Our most imaginative, playful, immediate voice–the one who does the heavy lifting in the first draft stage–does not inherently lack quality, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary.

Have you noticed?

We often spend much of our time and energy uncovering layers we’ve added later in the process in order to return to the “vitality” of our initial impulse, as wild and unformed as it may have first arrived.

Why not instead embrace the risk of joyful engagement in every phase of the creative process and allow it all to be potentially successful and also not so successful?

Most of all, we could wonder aloud what lovely, unique, valuable ideas or lines already gleam brightly within our first drafts.

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They may be diamonds in the rough, yes, but isn’t it more productive to search for the glimmer rather than despair over the dirt?

Looking at our early work through this shifted lens may ultimately empower us more than giving ourselves permission for the writing to be bad.

Without the inevitability of failure looming over our heads, perhaps we can see our early successes more clearly, and from them, craft the best version of what we have to offer the world, aiming to shine always brighter.