Episode 85: Writers, Here's Your Permission to Write A Messy First Draft

Write the messy first draft. Write, write, and write some more. Let your ideas flow and don't look back until you get to the end. The first draft is about getting your ideas on paper and then you'll have something to work with. It's not the time to edit or censor yourself. 

Write the messy first draft. It's normal to have self-doubt creep in and try to distract you from your writing. Keep writing. 

This episode is your permission to write the messy first draft. It's for your eyes only, unless you choose to share it, so write, write, and write some more. 

You're invited to join us for our Virtual Writing Retreat October 11 and 12 on Zoom! 

You’re invited to connect with us by joining our Embodied Writing Experience where you’ll get a writer’s retreat directly to your inbox on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays each week. Whether you’re working on a memoir, a novel, or journaling for yourself, this is an invitation to slow down, tune in, and write with embodied intention.   

Join our Embodied Writing Experience where you’ll get a writer’s retreat directly to your inbox on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays each week. Whether you’re working on a memoir, a novel, or journaling for yourself, this is an invitation to slow down, tune in, and write with embodied intention.

Get on the waitlist for the Memoir Master Plan cohort here.

If you prefer video versions of the podcast, you can find all of them on our YouTube channel.

Transcript

1:01

Listeners to another episode of the Inspired Writer Collective. Today we're gonna be talking about the messy first draft. We've done previous episodes about first chapter challenges, and so this is sort of a piggyback on that. It's the whole first draft of your story, and today, I hope what you'll take away from this as you listen to us talk about this, is that we are giving you permission to let it be messy, to not get stuck in. What needs to go in there, in perfectionism, in legal considerations, um, even in content, you simply need to start and get through it. So, Stephanie, I know you have a lot of experience with First Drafts. You're a published author in the nonfiction genre, but you've also written some drafts of two fiction books that you're working on simultaneously. Yes. Well, I will say it's so nice to. As you say, give myself and listener, give yourself the permission to make it messy, because I know that I am so quick to wanna get in my own way, to be the perfectionist, to wanna feel like I have to have the perfect words the first time on the page. And by thinking about, you know, Ann Lamont who says, you know, just get the words out on the page. It doesn't have to be perfect. You just need to get the words out and you know. Get a shitty first draft out there and you know, make it happen because we know it's easier to go back to something you've already written. And even if what you write is not gonna end up in the final draft, it's still important to sit down and write. And, and I do have two projects going simultaneously with my A DHD brain that. Needs both. Needs both to keep me showing up to the page, but there is something. Powerful about just saying to myself, you just have to show up and write something today. And I know there's probably a lot of it.'cause especially with fiction, I'm, you know, I'm building my world with, for my characters, I'm, I'm creating these characters. They're not real people like memoir, where you already have a very distinct knowledge and awareness of who the people in your life are that you're writing about. It's, you know, really building this and so. There's probably a lot of backstory I'm writing that's never gonna end up in the final draft, and I'm okay with that. It's like, okay, I just have to keep moving forward. Right. We all need to be okay with that there, even in memoir, there is a level of exploratory writing that you end up doing in your first draft. I wrote my first draft of my memoir pretty quickly, and I do recommend that most people create some sort of schedule for their writing that allows them to sort of sprint through that first draft, because I see over and over again that. Writers get stuck because they never make it past or, or all the way through their first draft. Um, because of the reasons that we'll, you know, flesh out as far as like getting in their heads and pre-judging their, their writing and all of that. But I, I wrote my first draft of a probably 45,000 Word book. Um, so shorter than most. And it was a combo of self-help and memoir. And I did that at about four months. And I was writing for like, multiple hours a day.'cause my, that time my daughter was in like a half day preschool program and I was a stay at home mom. So I had that time, I had that freedom. And it's so important to like just get through it and to not judge yourself for it. And there's a lot that you gain as a writer through that process. One, as you already brought up Stephanie, you gain some insight into your characters and into your backstory. This is so important, even for memoir to understand. The backstory because a lot of times when you write your first draft, there is absolutely no expectation that you're gonna know truly where your story starts and ends. So it takes some of this experimentation of writing, maybe some of the stuff that historically will get cut out because it's not as close to the. You know, rising action, the inciting incident that you ultimately focus on in your finished book, but you still have to write it and explore it even in me memoir, to understand some of those patterns that you wanna highlight and how you want to curate your author voice. I recently picked up a copy of The Art of Memoir by Mary Carr, and she's written several memoirs and she talks a lot about author voice, and I just wanna share a little bit. About what she says in regards to that first draft in the author, voice and memoir. She says Each voice is cleverly fashioned. To highlight a writer's individual talent or way of viewing the world, a memoirist starts off fumbling, jotting down facts, recounting, anecdotes. It may take a writer, hundreds of rough trial pages, AKA, your messy first draft for a way of speaking to start to emerge. Unique to himself and his experience, but when he does both carnal and interior. Experiences come back with clarity and the work gains an electrical charge for the reader. The voice has to exist from the first sentence. Hmm. A lot of people are coming to memoir with this being their first foray into writing, and I even have a member of the master plan cohort right now who has written in a different genre, a fiction genre, and even she is finding that she's got to figure out what her memoir voice sounds like because it's different than her fiction writing voice. And that takes time. And the only way to do that. Is to start writing, is to write that messy first draft. So I hope that you'll see listener, that it's all a part of the process. That writing that first draft is the way that you start to sort out you, your character worldviews, whether they're fictional or whether they're, you know, a former version of yourself. It's hard even to write the character of yourself. Mm-hmm. Because you know yourself so fully and you have to choose what parts of yourself you're going to show the reader on the page. It's, it's impossible to show them all of you. So you have to pick what viewpoints you're gonna push forward. What beliefs are gonna be most relevant to the message you're trying to share, and the story you're trying to write. I learned a lot about myself reading back my first draft. I learned that I didn't want to have any self-help portions that I wanted to take my book to full memoir. It was also in reading back that rough draft that I was able to see some of the cycles and the patterns that I was able to emphasize and pull out in later drafts and really hone that core message. I started much more broadly about finding community and finding connection. And ultimately have honed it down to something that feels more true. And in talking about my self-love journey and my self-worth, and how showing up authentically knowing myself and accepting myself. Is what was able to help me build authentic, lasting connections. I wouldn't have understood this, I wouldn't have found this message if I hadn't done the first draft. If I had judged myself for not having a great core message, or for not knowing exactly where the story was going, if I had. Stopped the writing because I could see the weakness in the self-help sections compared to the memoir story sections. If I had stopped at any of those points, I would not have gained the wisdom that I now use in the next step. And I think a lot of people get really stuck. On the first draft. Within the first draft because they wonder how they're gonna feel and they're, they're fearful of what they might see when they read it back. They're fearful that what they're just gonna prove to themselves is that they're a garbage writer. They're fearful that when they read back that completed first draft, they're not gonna find a story. They're gonna see poor grammar. They're going to, you know, have so many loose plot holes and, and untied, you know, storylines and sure, you might see some of that, but I promise you, what you're also going to see is your heart. You're going to see, mm-hmm. At least echoes of your voice. Even if you still have to hone that a bit, you're gonna start to uncover what your deeper message and deeper story is that you're trying to convey to your reader. And you only get that gift if you put in the work. Of your first draft. Mm-hmm. Well, and I, and especially I love what you say about, you know, you, you hone in on your deeper message because I've been talking a lot recently about how with the memoir, master plan cohort starting and all of the talk about the core message, that even though I'm not writing memoir, though it might happen eventually. That even with my fiction writing that I have found through writing all these multiple first drafts and working my way through them, that I've finally landed on my own core message, you know, what is my purpose for what I'm writing? And I wouldn't have come to that if I hadn't just allowed myself to show up. On the schedule that I have for myself, which varies, you know, I, I aim for every day, but that doesn't always happen. Um, but when I show up, I'm showing up so that I get the words out and I am just, you know, letting it happen on the page, however it happens. And the cool thing is, is that even when you think you have a plan, sometimes the story just takes you, and even when it's your own story, you're all of a sudden writing and. You think, wow, I didn't know that it was going to go that way. And it can be surprising in a good way, or it can be a surprising in like, oh, I especially, you know, with memoir, like, I'm not sure I'm ready to go down that path. But maybe you go down that path. And the great thing about the Bessie first draft is it's for your eyes only. Nobody else has to see it unless you wanna share it and get feedback on it. But really you can write it. You can scrap it. Maybe it's just like, okay, that's never gonna see the light of day. But then the good news is, is that you've built up the habit around showing up for yourself and for your writing. And that's what the first draft does for you. And I think you bring up a great point. I mean, especially in that quote from Mary Carr about, you know, hundreds of pages sometimes that mm-hmm. It's, you know, and I think that's one of the hardest things as a writer is. In our society, there's this idea as we see books published and everything, oh, somebody can write so fast, or they're getting that to market so fast. And the truth is, is it's not fast. It, it gets faster when, some of the big authors get contracts and they have to put out a book every year. Then that puts more, and they've learned their voice. Yes, exactly. They, they've learned their voice. They learned their rhythm. Rhythm because they've done the hundreds of pages of drafting. They know they have their outline that they know they're gonna follow, um, and the story they want to tell, and they've honed in on that. But it comes from. Hours and hours of showing up and doing the hard work of the messy first draft. And I'm pretty sure if you were to, you know, go down the Google rabbit hole searching about famous authors and their writing process, I mean, in my experience having gone to listen to authors talk and there's not an author I haven't encountered that hasn't talked about. The trials and tribulations of the messy first draft. And it's why it's so important to give yourself grace and know that this takes time. And it can be hard because if you're not surrounded by writers, and again, this brings in what we talk about all the time about find your people because they'll understand, you know, there may be people in your family or around you who don't understand that it does take time. You know, they're like, well, haven't you written your. Book yet. Mm-hmm. And, and it can make you start to feel like you have to shrink because, oh, well, maybe I'm not doing it well enough because I'm not writing it fast enough. But that's not the truth. The reality is, is that it, it is gonna take you time. And that's what we're hoping to normalize with this podcast episode is that that first draft is gonna be ugly, but you don't have anything to edit if you don't put it on the page. And I, for one, was a little bit nervous about moving into the editing stage. I found the writing stage to be, you know, something that I enjoyed and I was nervous about how I would feel about editing, like. Would I know how to change things? Would I know like what needed to be tweaked or, or redone or rewritten? And I found that I actually really loved the editing stage and I found it so much easier because I had words to work with. I had concepts, I had characters, I had, you know, plot points and all of those things. Granted, that came from also having a very detailed outline that I help other memoir writers create in the memoir master plan cohort. And it was so much easier. Like the whole quote of, you know, you can't, you know, edit if it's a blank page, that intimidation of the blank page was so much harder than the next step. Mm-hmm. So that's why we're encouraging you to just. Move through it, put words on the page, everything can be tweaked. I, I would guess there's maybe 10 to 15% of the words from my original first draft in my latest draft that I sent off to an editor this summer. Maybe 15% at most. But it was so important. And I wanna share another excerpt that you brought up. Character. Um, I wanna share another excerpt from Mary Carr where she talks about the memoir writer and finding their character. She says, you're looking for that inner enemy. That'll help you to structure the book. I always have inklings of it, but tend to find it by writing interior frets and confessions and yearning as I recall them. Maybe it's only manifest after a first draft. Once I've found it, I'll revise with it as the spine, how the self evolves to reconcile its inner complex over time. Your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end. So again, in this excerpt, she's highlighting the fact that. You are trying to find that, what she calls the inner enemy, I call it. Um, a lot of times in my memoir course I talk about the, the misbelief that you're holding onto, um, at the beginning of the story and the ways in which you either validate that misbelief or question that misbelief throughout your journey and ultimately come to a place at the end of the book where you share with your reader your journey of finding a. A more true belief about yourself or your world. You know, she calls that the inner enemy, but you know, some sort of character flaw or, or misbelief that you have that is leading you down the wrong path, that is causing conflict, that is presenting you with issues that you finally address and put to rest. Um, so I really appreciate that excerpt from her because she. Notes that a lot of times in order to find that, that's deep work. And in order to find that, a lot of times doing the exploratory writing that the first draft usually ends up being, is so paramount in landing on the right thing. So let that pressure release. You do not need to know that going into the first draft. Mm-hmm. That is. That is something you discover through the writing process. Just like you don't have to be a great writer going into your first draft. That is something you develop. It is a journey and it is a process, and you only, uh. Hone that you only refine it. It only gets tempered by walking through the fire of writing the first draft. That's how you do it. So there's all these classes and all these programs and all these things to, you know, try to tell, like alleviate those fears and set you up and tell you this is how you become a writer. Do this first. But you don't have to. You can literally. It's part of the process. You do it as you go. Mm-hmm. And that's really the best way to get through it. Um, a quote from Bernard Malman says, first drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Mm-hmm. Or in my case, what it wasn't about, because I cut out all of the self-help portions. Stephanie, I know that with your first drafts and your attempts at writing these stories. That you found that to be true, that you are learning about the story as you're writing? Well, and what comes to mind too, and when I think about quotes about writing, is I read one this morning that's from Margaret Atwood, which is a word after a word. After a word is power. And I think that that's something that, especially when I think about memoir writing and the stories that. We have in our lives. And that, that there's so much truth in that and when you say that quote, I mean just sitting here just having said that, there's like this spark of energy, of thinking, wow, if I just start writing words. There's power in my words, there's powers listener in your story. And I can say this too, when I think about the memoir master plan cohort, and I'm a supportive coach in that, uh, work and being able to show up and listen to the women who are in that group who. Just like you listener, have their self doubts, they worry they're not good enough. They're worried, they don't know enough. They worry, they don't know what their story's gonna be and all those pieces, but we work on developing that mindset around. Just get the story out. This is the time to, yes, there's work on on determining structure and outline, but ultimately at the core of all of it is getting the story on the page and releasing that, and you can just see how much it transforms the individuals and listener. You'll find yourself transformed when you're allowed to. Write your story and put your honest self on the page. And I think that that's one of the pieces about the messy first draft is, allow it to be messy. Allow yourself to show up and scribble on a notepad or you're typing it and don't worry about all of the mechanics of writing because that's why there are. Editors, and that's why there are people who will read it for you and you'll have a team down the road that you can bring together. Because truly when, when I've listened to panels of, of indie authors who are self-publishing and authors who are traditionally published. They talk about having that team around them, which we don't often see when we think about writers, because everybody has this, oh, it's the ivory tower and you've locked yourself in there and you don't talk to anybody, and that's not the truth about writing. You'll have a team who will help you when you're ready to seek them out and support you, which is why just get it on the page. Mm-hmm. If you're not confident about your edit, let somebody else do that for you. And that's where the confidence of showing up for like, oh, I can make this messy, like, you know, throw mud at the walls. Let it happen and, and you'll feel. So much more empowered yourself the more you keep showing up. Yeah, exactly. You have to write it for you first. That's who the first draft is for. It is for you. It's for you as a, to develop as a writer. It's for you to find your author voice. It's for you to see your story, to gain a deeper insight into your message. And then you rewrite it. It's interesting because I saw kind of a slew of comments on threads a couple of months ago that so many writers were talking about the fact that they write their first draft. And then they don't edit their first draft. They rewrite their second draft with the knowledge that they've gained from writing their first draft. So if you feel like that approach would work for you, you can write your first draft in a notebook. We have a author coming on the podcast as a guest coming up, and he writes his first draft in a notebook. The benefit of that is that you're less likely to edit. Your handwritten writing, then you are the typing on the screen. So if you find yourself getting stuck in wanting to edit or, or as you go back to see where you left off, you're trying to make tweaks, maybe consider just handwriting it in a notebook so that you're a little bit more removed from the ease of being able to edit it. The w you know, spelling suggestions that the computer gives you, the grammar rephrasing that your writing program suggests. Potentially writing it on the page itself, handwriting it in a notebook. Mm. Might be a way to help separate yourself from the next phase, which is editing and. We want to invite you to join us. We are going to be hosting another one of our free quarterly virtual writing retreats. This is a great place to come and work on writing that first draft. The way these retreats work is they're virtual, they're held via Zoom. We send you the links, and there are morning and afternoon sessions where you get to work on your own writing project. You're not given prompts, you're not given anything that you have to do by us. You bring your project wherever you're at in your writing journey, and you get usually about 45 minutes per session to. Put those words onto the page, and over the course of a weekend, a Saturday and Sunday, there's four writing sessions. Maybe you can only make it to the two morning sessions. Maybe you can make it to all four. Either way, we invite you to come and carve out that time. We have our next one scheduled for early October it's the 11th and 12th. So if you want access to those links, again, this is a free retreat. All you need to do is join our email list, because that is how we're gonna be sharing the Zoom links for those meetings. So hop on our Embodied Writer Writing Experience newsletter, an email list, so that way you can get those links and you can make some serious progress on that messy first draft. Yes. Brighter, we. Listener, we hope that you will join us. And again, you know, previous participants in our writing retreats have shared that it was a great time to make the time for themselves that they wouldn't have normally carved out, which is sometimes in our busy lives, it can. Really easy to let your writing slip to the side and not give it the space and time that it needs. But this is your opportunity to do that. And I just wanna comment, uh. On what Elizabeth was talking about, about getting out a journal and handwriting your work, that that is such a great way to come to your writing and get words on the page, and especially with memoir, where there's really that head and heart connection to your self and your story that. It really becomes even more powerful, uh, when you're able to hand write it. So definitely enc. I encourage that. And again, as we've talked about this whole episode show, get the messy first draft out and. Join our Embodied Writing Experience email list, and we invite you to the virtual retreat, and I'm gonna close out this podcast episode with a quote from Jane Smiley about the first draft. She says, every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do. Is exist. It is perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to not exist. I.