100 Day Creative Challenge Day 50: Just Do It!
Anne Lamont famously wrote a chapter entitled *SFD’s in her book on writing, Bird by Bird. Lamont writes: The first draft is a 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.’ I know all about SFD’s. You get the words down—rough, reckless words. Words that read like rubbish, but once you polish them the words flow like music and sing off the page.
I’m about half-way through a 100 000 word novel and I keep getting stalled because I get bogged down trying to make sentences perfect. Writers far, far better than me would tell me to just get the story down and fix it later. Sometimes we think too much about things and become blocked.
It’s not just in writing that this applies. If I cooked dinner every night and obsessed about each part of the recipe and ingredients, I might never finish cooking anything. We get bogged by down by perfectionism. Being authentic, deciding our best is enough and being brave enough to just get the words down on the page is where we start to make progress.
It’s a process of trying to convince ourselves that what we’re doing in a first draft isn’t important. When I put myself in solitary confinement and set myself the goal to write and write and write and write, I can write thousands of words and make great progress.
Everyone’s process and roadblocks are different. First drafts are messy, have clunky expression, gaps, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes— are just the bare bones. Once you have a first draft, you have something to work with. If you’ve written nothing, you have nothing to work with.
So, the challenge today — for me, and you — is just do it!
One way you get through the wall is
by convincing yourself that it doesn’t matter.
No one is ever going to see your first draft.
Nobody cares about your first draft.
And that’s the thing that you may be agonizing over,
but honestly,
whatever you’re doing can be fixed. …
For now, just get the words out.
Get the story down however you can get it down,
then fix it.
Neil Gaiman
*Shitty First Drafts
