Most writing advice washes over you. You hear it, you nod, you forget it by the time you sit down. Occasionally something lands differently. It arrives at the right moment, or it’s phrased in a way that suddenly makes sense of something you’d been struggling with for a long time.
Here’s the advice that stuck.
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
I heard this early and didn’t really understand it until much later. What it means is that the first draft is not the thing. It’s the process of finding out what the thing is. You’re not writing for a reader yet. You’re writing to discover what you actually want to say, where the story actually goes, what the characters actually do when you let them move. The reader comes later, in revision. The first draft is private. It’s allowed to be a mess. In fact it should be, because a first draft that’s too careful is usually a first draft that’s too cautious to find anything interesting.
“Don’t get it right, get it written.”
Linked to the above but worth having separately. The perfectionism that freezes writers during a first draft is misplaced energy. Perfectionism is an editing tool. During the first draft it’s just fear wearing a productive-looking disguise. Get the words down in whatever shape they arrive. There will be time to make them better. There is no time to make them better if they don’t exist yet.
“Write the book you want to read.”
Simple, obvious, easy to forget. When you’re lost in craft questions and market questions and what-will-people-think questions, this one cuts through all of it. What do you actually want? What would you pick up and read? Write that. The writer who is genuinely interested in what they’re making is always more compelling than the one performing what they think they should be writing.
“Rewriting is writing.”
For a long time I thought revision was a lesser activity. The real writing was the first draft, the raw material, the creative surge. Revision was just tidying. This is completely backwards. The first draft is raw material and nothing more. The writing happens in revision, in the slow deliberate work of understanding what you made and making it better. Most published writing has been rewritten more times than the final version suggests. That’s not a failure of the first draft. That’s just how it works.
“The reader can’t see what’s in your head. Only what’s on the page.”
This one stung when I first heard it. You know what you meant. You know what you were going for. That knowledge lives in your head and it makes the writing feel clearer and more complete than it actually is on the page. The reader has only the words. If the words don’t do the job, the intention behind them doesn’t matter. Read your work as if you know nothing about it. That’s the only version the reader will ever have.
These aren’t rules. They’re just things that changed how I sit down and approach the work. Take what’s useful. Leave the rest.
Leave a Reply