Thursday, July 31, 2014

Write Crap!

I'm a newbie. I admit that.

And I'm still prone to making newbie mistakes.
One of the ones I'm proud of NOT making anymore is that I no longer struggle with getting the words down.

It used to be a huge struggle.
I would write a chapter, and before I could go on to the next, I would rework it over, and over and over again, trying to make absolutely perfect. I think a lot of newbie writers struggle with this.

I've adopted a new philosophy of writing my first draft, however. I think it's a philosophy shared with most writers, at least the ones that I've heard from. I call it "flinging crap fast and furious."

The first draft is going to be crap.
It's okay to be crap.
It's expected to be crap.
There is no shame in crap.

After all, it's the first draft. Not the second, or third, or twelfth. It's okay to be crappy.
So, just get the crappy writing over and done with as fast as humanly possible.
Write as much as you can, as fast as you can, without stopping to revise and edit along the way.
I've heard that some writers don't even bother to fix typos or spelling errors as they write their first draft. I'll admit, I hit the backspace button quite a bit to redo misspellings, but other than that, just get it out there.

Get it done.

Get your crappy writing down on the page.
You can fix your crap later.