From Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, on shitty first drafts:
Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated.
Merlin Mann at 43 Folders on turning procrastination into your shitty first draft:
The trick is to find that very first point when some part of your thinking can be converted from uncaptured brain droppings into notes, doodles, outlines, or any kind of markings on a page — even though it’s clearly not ready to be shaped into a deliverable just yet. Whether it’s your unified field theory of physics or a 50-word blog post about the molé burrito you just ate, it pays to get something down. Anything. In my experience, getting that hand in motion tends to really stimulate creativity. The rough draft process is where procrastination is finally displaced by clarity, focus, and a fuller understanding of the relationships between the things that have been collecting in your brain pan.
Josh DiMauro uses paper to capture his shitty first draft:
That’s why you start with paper.
Because, again, your first draft is going to suck. You want to get it out and down, so that you can move on, and redo it completely later.
And there’s something about paper that makes it a lot easier to do crappy work quickly: it’s just paper. Who cares if your sketch comes out looking like a frog being taken from behind by an e. coli bacterium? You’re going to move on to the next shitty sketch, and to the next, and to the next. And then you’re going to sift through them, and gather up maybe two or three, and dump the rest.
That’s the whole point. It’s just paper, so it doesn’t count.
Now, on to the project that is calling me to do the shitty first drafts of the deliverables before I start to do the work so that I can see what the gap is between current reality and desired reality.
"Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" (Anne Lamott)
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