“The first draft of everything is shit.” -Ernest Hemingway
Truer words may have never been spoken. Sitting down and creating coherent prose off the cuff is a daunting task, even for the genius that was Mr. Hemingway. I have come to realize this particular point much more acutely in the short time since starting this blog. This being my first attempt at writing any original content since college, I have been reminded quite blatantly of the difficulty that comes along with the creation of original content worthy of putting on the page. Sitting down to write after a long day of work, or school, or both as is my current case, does not lend itself to the creation of literary masterpieces. Even coming up with bullshit rants seems taxing after a 13 hour day. Even still, I find that the greatest challenge for me is not sitting down to do it, it’s accepting the inevitable shitty first draft. I never allow myself the ugly, childish, disorganized draft that facilitates the eventual cohesive final product. You know, the first draft that you wouldn’t show to anyone, ever. The one that is so bad it makes you reexamine your life and want to retire from creative thinking altogether. Either that or put a fist through the monitor glaring at you with your pathetic prose. Regardless of how you deal with the insulting mindfuck that is the first draft, the real difficulty is realizing its necessity. Without putting together some type of rough outline, the work can become a case study in meticulously finding the perfect word for each situation, while missing the flow of the piece as a whole. Micromanaging the first draft, as I always somehow manage to do, leads to the death of coherency. I have spent ten minutes (not an exaggeration) fastidiously crafting a perfect sentence, using all the words with the correct connotative references to whatever it is that I’m trying to describe, orchestrating the proper cadence, and rearranging everything to perfection, only to move on to the next sentence and forget entirely the trajectory of the section I’m working on. Fifty perfect sentences don’t make a perfect written work. Fifty perfect sentences can create fifty different wonderful worlds of creative prose, and still lack the continuity and flow of a well written piece. I can’t tell you how many times I have spent hours writing an excruciatingly small number of sentences only to abandon them in their infancy on the church steps of my computer’s trash can because, though great sentences, they don’t coalesce into the whole I had originally envisioned.
And here it becomes obvious why the shitty first draft is so invaluable—it allows a stream of consciousness flow of ideas to be recorded as it happens, unhindered and uncensored by self-criticism. It permits thought to be articulated in its entirety, before it can be cannibalized by our internal editorial filters, allowing the essence of the idea to exist in the form in which it comes to us. The shitty first draft is the record of an original idea, in all of the chaos and imperfection that accompany creative expression.
These moments of inspiration should not be subjected to the constraints of censorship, as doing so has the potential to stifle the original idea before it is fully formed. In other words, let the first draft be gloriously shitty. Turn the censors off. Create something. Worry about word choice and run-on sentences later.
“Art is what we call the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.” -Seth Godin
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