Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Tuesday Tips: The First draft

The first draft of everything is shit. 
-Ernest Hemingway

This tip will be harder to execute than you will believe. It sounds simple.

Give yourself permission to write a shitty first draft. I say it all the time. Hammer through without looking back. Focus. Don't revise.

Read these quotes now and then to remind you:

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.
– Joshua Wolf Shenk

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
— George Orwell


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