To All My Fellow Heartless Who Lack Romantic Notions... Happy Valentines 🫀✨

Drafting: The Theory of Shitty First Drafts

Writing books often exhort you to “write a shitty first draft,” but I always resisted this advice. After all,

I was already writing shitty drafts, even when I tried to write good ones. Why go out of my way to make them shittier?

A shitty first draft just kicks the can down the road, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, I’d have to write a good draft—why put it off?

If I wrote without judging what I wrote, how would I make any creative choices at all?

That first draft inevitably obscured my original vision, so I wanted it to be at least slightly good.

Writing something shitty meant I was shitty.

So for years, I kept writing careful, cramped, painstaking first drafts—when I managed to write at all. At last, writing became so joyless, so draining, so agonizing for me that I got desperate: I either needed to quit writing altogether or give the shitty-first-draft thing a try.

Turns out everything I believed about drafting was wrong.

For the last six months, I’ve written all my first drafts in full-on don’t-give-a-fuck mode. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

“Shitty first draft” is a misnomer

A rough draft isn’t just a shitty story, any more than a painter’s preparatory sketch is just a shitty painting. Like a sketch, a draft is its own kind of thing: not a lesser version of the finished story, but a guide for making the finished story.

Once I started thinking of my rough drafts as preparatory sketches, I stopped fretting over how “bad” they were. Is a sketch “bad”? And actually, a rough draft can be beautiful the same way a sketch is beautiful: it has its own messy energy.

Don’t try to do everything at once

People who make complex things need to solve one kind of problem before they can solve others. A painter might need to work out where the big shapes go before they can paint the details. A writer might need to decide what two people are saying to each other before they can describe the light in the room or what those people are doing with their hands.

I’d always embraced this principle up to a point. In the early stages, I’d speculate and daydream and make messy notes. But that freedom would end as soon as I started drafting. When you write a scene, I thought, you have to start with the first word and write the rest in order. Then it dawned on me: nobody would ever see this! I could write the dialogue first and the action later; or the action first and the dialogue later; or some dialogue and action first and then interior monologue later; or I could write the whole thing like I was explaining the plot to my friend over the phone. The draft was just one very long, very detailed note to myself. Not a story, but a preparatory sketch for a story. Why not do it in whatever weird order made sense to me?

Get all your thoughts onto the page

Here’s how I used to write: I’d sit there staring at the screen and I’d think of something—then judge it, reject it, and reach for something else, which I’d most likely reject as well—all without ever fully knowing what those things were. And once you start rejecting thoughts, it’s hard to stop. If you don’t write down the first one, or the second, or the third, eventually your thought-generating mechanism jams up. You become convinced you have no thoughts at all.

When I compare my old drafts with my new ones, the old ones look coherent enough. They’re presentable as stories. But they suck as drafts, because I can’t see myself thinking in them. I have no idea what I wanted that story to be. These drafts are opaque and airless, inscrutable even to me, because a good 90% of what I was thinking while I wrote them never made it onto the page.

These days, most of my thoughts go onto the page, in one form or another. I don’t waste time figuring out how to say something, I just ask, “what are you trying to say here?” and write that down. Because this isn’t a story, it’s a plan for a story, so I just need the words to be clear, not beautiful. The drafts I write now are full of placeholders and weird meta notes, but when I read them, I can see where my mind is going. I can see what I’m trying to do. Consequently, I no longer feel like my drafts obscure my original vision. In fact, their whole purpose is to describe that vision.

Drafts are memos to future-you

To draft effectively, you need a personal drafting style or “language” to communicate with your future self (who is, of course, the author of your second draft). This language needs to record your ideas quickly so it can keep up with the pace of your imagination, but it needs to do so in a form that will make sense to you later. That’s why everyone’s drafts look different: your drafting style has to fit the way your mind works.

I’m still working mine out. Honestly, it might take a while. But recently, I started writing in fragments. That’s just how my mind works: I get pieces of sentences before I understand how to fit them together. Wrestling with syntax was slowing me down, so now I just generate the pieces and save their logical relationships for later. Drafting effectively means learning these things about yourself. And to do that, you can’t get all judgmental. You can’t fret over how you should be writing, you just gotta get it done.

Messy drafts are easier to revise

I find that drafting quickly and messily keeps the story from prematurely “hardening” into a mute, opaque object I’m afraid to change. I no longer do that thing, for instance, where I endlessly polish the first few paragraphs of a draft without moving on. Because how do you polish a bunch of fragments taped together with dashes? A draft that looks patently “unfinished” stays malleable, makes me want to dig my hands in and move stuff around.

You already have ideas

Sitting down to write a story, I used to feel this awful responsibility to create something good. Now I treat drafting simply as documenting ideas I already have—not as creation at all, but as observation and description. I don’t wait around for good words or good ideas. I just skim off whatever’s floating on the surface and write it down. It’s that which allows other, potentially better ideas to surface.

As a younger writer, my misery and frustration perpetuated themselves: suppressing so many thoughts made my writing cramped and inhibited, which convinced me I had no ideas, which made me even more afraid to write lest I discover how empty inside I really was. That was my fear, I guess: if I looked squarely at my innocent, unvetted, unvarnished ideas, I’d see how bad they truly were, and then I’d have to—what, pack up and go home? Never write again? I don’t know. But when I stopped rejecting ideas and started dumping them onto the page, the worst didn’t happen. In fact, it was a huge relief.

Next post: the practice of shitty first drafts

Ask me a question or send me feedback!

happy WBW! i am so intrigued by prisma and wonder if you could go into a little more detail abt the colour coding? :)

Thank you for the ask! Conveniently, this is actually the subject of my brainrot and thus you are a very kind mutual. Sorry if this is a bit incoherent btw. I'll deep-dive the specific components at a later date.

The colour coding is a huge part of Prisma both in it's conception and worldbuilding. Each story revolving around their respective protagonist is coded a colour (I.E, Jack's story and red); themes, ideas, and symbolism regarding this occur both in a meta way and in an in-universe way.

Neat fact: Prisma is a play on the word "Prismatic", nodding to the fact that white can be split into the spectrum of colours by a prism.

Quick Breakdown of Prisma:

Prisma is the setting of these stories, and colours - hues are the primary power/magic system. A surreal other-land where figurative can become literal and vice versa. Hues are it's fundamental building block, existing both as an abstract but also a resource. Here is where our three protagonists come in: at some point in their stories they become 'Key Figures', a facet of that colour embodied in a person. I'll elaborate on that particular concept in another post.

I'll give you the rundown on each protagonist and their relation to the colour coding. These aren't the only aspects of the hues, but the main ones.

Jack, Red -

“It doesn’t matter what powers you hold, or the trials you’ve faced; as long as I reach into the four corners, my Judgement is tangible irregardless.”

Red watches over rules and conventions. It's a hue of hierarchy, of domination and submission, of judgement. It works with the pre-existing fabric of things, tending towards tangling things in it's rules rather than violating it's own tenets.

There's also another aspect integral to red: Mediums. In Prisma, a Medium is not someone who merely gazes ghosts, but possess sight that stretches past horizons; the domain of a medium is to wrench meaning from things. Mediumship as a quality is inherently linked to the hue of red.

What this means for Jack, my favourite red-eyed little bastard, is that his power is in pulling at exposed threads. People constantly transgress all sorts of rules - personal, natural, even physical rules; it just isn't noticed. Jack as a key figure is an Arbiter. By acknowledging a transgression the appropriate punishment is applied automatically as a principle of Prisma itself.

He can gaze at the True Names of things, unravel their nature and bring forth what lays dormant.

As a whole it also ties in with Jack's character and background. There's more to it but I'll elaborate on a dedicated post.

Hel, Blue -

Blue is to expand and grow endlessly. It's boon and plight is that everything that that it is will behold genesis, but all that they are is the horizon's boundary

The sky, the ocean; a roiling pit of genesis from which life sprung. Blue is desire and manifestation - the self crystalised into something tangible. In it's purest form as a hue it is creation unbridled. However, blue - deep, roiling blue, horizon spanning azure - is crystallisation of self. It's dominion ends past the boundary of self, past the ownership of such a minor existence.

Blue can create vast shapes and forms, even spring life to being with it's lustre, yet it has no control over that which it did not create.

Hel first wields this hue in the form of the Principle class artefact 'The Flask', a portion of the sky stolen and inverted long ago, bound by it's own genesis. Hel's character arc is about identity and assumptions, of presumed boundaries and humanity. And how enough imagination can transcend flesh.

Absorbing The Flask at the precipice of death something much vaster, and above all free. The key limitations of this hue remain true, but post-rebirth Hel's entire body is comprised of blue, they let it seep into the ground and spread themselves vast and wide. Something brilliantly inhuman.

Dorothea, Purple -

Pocket watches running in parallel and paradox to the march of moons

Such an awfully royal colour, and so fitting is it for sovereignty to be it's domain. Many things hold power over others: the moon over night and the passage of time, the land from which things sprout, and of course what every person owns: themself.

Dorothea's sovereignty is to fragment - split things into parts, isolate them and take ownership. If she wins ownership over something she can even fragment it's time; send things backwards, freeze things into a single state, steal something's time spent.

Red, Blue, and Purple form a colour triad, and one of purple's specialities is 'borrowing' from these. Out of all the hues Purple is the only one able to use aspects of another by collecting fragments belonging to them.

To the Lilac Sovereign what may be someone's present is merely a puzzle to rearrange to their whims.

Without subjects sovereignty means nothing. Thus, in pursuit of her own royalty Dorothea fragmented herself to become her very own pawn.

Extra Tidbits :

The powers a hue possesses has a lot to do with the associations and symbols connected with them, and while each hue has a scope of it's own they can present in several ways. A key figure is a pure manifestation and expression of the hue, often taking a specific thematic direction. Hues are used by others in the form of materials imbued with it naturally, artefacts, or by acquiring it as a part of oneself.

Red as a hue is violent and bloody and passionate, essential yet bitter like blood. That's kind of why I went with hierarchy/rules. Also got some prey/predator stuff going on.

Blue, to me, is a colour of imagination, creation, and things so vast it's terrifying. Think like life arising from the sea.

Royalty for purple, obviously, but I think it's a very moon-ish, celestial and mystical colour. Time, both as an invention to understand the passing of events better, and as a natural mechanism are very big here.

There are other hues and such and they do stuff but I'm focusing on blue, red, and purple as they're the colours of the respective protagonists.

The colour triad dynamic is kind of:

Red is concerned with rules and convention, judging and causing conclusion in the present.

Blue is creating things anew in the present that persist.

Purple isn't tethered to present: rearranging and altering the state of things.

ALSO: I really didn't want to do like "Red=Fire" or something and I wanted something symbolic to fit my surreal little world so the hues do not function in such a straightforward way.

Whats the history of executioners as a societal class? Im ready

this article provides a pretty good quick but in-depth summary on the subject. it's a really interesting case study in social exclusion and class/caste system dynamics!

There are a lot of great “Gale Approves” moments in the game, but I think my favorite might be one of the earliest (or possibly the very first?) one you can get.

It happens right after you ask him about himself and he gives you his “cat, wine, library” dialogue, ending with “didn’t that paint enough of a picture?”

If you press further by trying to peer into his mind via the tadpole and you succeed, you’ll only get a glimpse before he angrily shuts you out, and you’ll earn his disapproval:

He’s pissed, and rightly so.

However! In the next dialogue, if you tell him curiosity made you do it, he not only immediately forgives you, he ALSO gives you approval for it (thereby canceling out his prior disapproval):

I love this interaction for two reasons:

First, because it instantly tells you everything you need to know about Gale—he’s reserved until he gets to know you, he’s curious with a hint of mischief, and he’s very sweet and forgiving.

And second, because the whole interaction can be summed up as:

Gale: How dare you?!

Tav: Sorry, I’m a total nebshit.

Gale: OH! 😃👍 same

submissive in the way a livestock guardian dog is submissive to the sheep it kills wolves for

Judas kiss (but were both girls 😳)

They are having a moment

warning!! modern ‘poetry’ is turning our daughters into beautiful bisexual men!!

Inhuman nature

DnD OC Bloodhound

“The Tomb I will serve till the end of my days, and then see me buried in two hundred graves”

This book is everything.