I knew this, intellectually. I’ve read Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird several times now, and this is one of her key lessons. But it wasn’t until I started working on NaNo that it really hit me how genius this is. Hell, even no less a Great American Novelist than Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.”
They’re both right. It’s hard to explain, but you get a sense of freedom when you’re writing crap. Or, more specifically, when you’re writing both crap and gold and don’t bother telling the two apart. Because oddly, that’s what happens. If you free yourself to write anything, some of it’s going to end up being really, really good. You don’t have to figure out which is which until rewrites. For your first draft, write anything and everything.
And as an extra added bonus, shitty first drafts give you unlimited Get Out Of Writer’s Block Free cards. If you find yourself blocked, just ask yourself, “And then what?” Unless you’ve pulled a Hamlet and killed off your whole cast, at least one of them is going to have to go do something next, even if it’s just picking up the dry cleaning. Keep going, forward momentum is everything. Eventually your characters will get back to the story and you can move on with the book. It doesn’t matter how boring the connective stuff is, because you’re going to cut that in rewrites. But for now, keep writing, no matter how bad it is!
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