Happy Monday morning dear readers! I hope your weekend was restful and full of enough excitement and fun that you’re fully recharged and ready to handle the work week’s stresses. To help you make it through another Monday morning (or, if you’re a Niner’s fan, help you cope with last night’s abysmal showing against the Seahawks), here is a little poster created by Demian Farnworth for Copy Blogger that lists the 10 rules for writing the dreaded First Draft.
I speak from experience when I say that writing the first draft for anything can be more than a little bit stressful, because oftentimes part of you feels like you need to make the first draft be perfect…and when it isn’t (and it *never* is) you feel like a complete and utter failure who needs to go hide under a rock because you’re a complete and utter failure. Well, shut this part of you up, because not only is this a silly habit, but it can also scare you to the point of writing paralysis if you let it (which is what’s happened with me with my novel.). The point of the first draft isn’t to make it perfect, it’s to have something completed that you’ll probably completely re-write in later drafts! It’s called a first draft for a reason: other drafts are supposed to follow it. Sometimes a couple, sometimes a dozen, sometimes a hundred; however many it takes before the manuscript has evolved from the first draft into a polished, publishable work of writing that you’re proud of.
So stop worrying that your first draft reads like something a toddler wrote, take a deep breath, read the 10 Rules for Writing First Drafts, and then get back to work on that first draft!
The Bewildered 20-Something Writer 