How to make your first draft less 💩

Shitty first drafts. They’re a necessary part of the creative process.

In Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, she opines:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

It probably wasn’t wise to share that quote because of what I’m about to share next:

My first draft of the book wasn’t all that bad.

Elegant? Definitely not. Shitty? Also, no.

And I think that’s because I started unconsciously working on my first draft years before I had a book deal.

Your first draft doesn’t have to be written

I didn’t know it then, but I started the first draft for Inner Workout in late 2018. I’d been selected to give a talk called Self-Care Beyond the Hashtags at a conference in London. It was the first time I’d tried to put my beliefs about self-care into any kind of framework.

I’ve probably given a version of that talk dozens of times since then. Each time, I gained an insight that would one day be incorporated into the book.

These are the questions people consistently ask. These are the examples that resonate. These are the places where people seem more or less engaged.

I’m not the only author who can trace the roots of their book back to a keynote presentation, but the takeaway isn’t that you need to be a speaker in order to be a writer. The point is that sharing your work with an audience and observing how it’s received will put you ahead of the curve when you finally sit down to write.

Your products can be first drafts

Looking back, Inner Workout’s first content products were also drafts of the book. The most obvious example is the Take Care assessment. It was originally my product-based response to the early days of the pandemic, and it ended up becoming the backbone of the book.

But it wasn’t just Take Care. Elements of workshops and coaching sessions and digital workbooks and courses are sprinkled throughout the pages.

With each offering, I refined my point of view. It was an editing process before the any book related editing began.

This “first draft development” began before a book was fully on my radar. Then, once the book deal materialized, my writing didn’t start from a blank page.

What first draft can you start today?

With this being the Process Report, you’ll find that many of these letters will invite you to simply start your process. The only reason I have anything remotely useful to share today is because I’ve been living my first drafts for years.

Research. Share. Brainstorm. Practice. Iterate. Apply. Pivot.

The process is the prize.