First Draft Fire!

This is you: this massive, epic mega-lion shadow-behemoth titan of awesomeness. You are bad-ass beyond belief. And you will write your manuscript.

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Ejecting the Brain Bog That Blocks You Every Time You Try to Sit Down and Write Your Truth

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1. Experimentation

The First Draft concerns only the rawest, most honest experimentation – neither polish, nor refinement will do. Expression beats perfection.

2. Exploration

Fall in love with an exploratory process of creation, rather than an athletic demonstration of skill. Express and discover! No need to strive here.

3. Gratitude

After your session, you’ll thank yourself for having written. You’ll thank yourself again tomorrow, and the next day, and even several months from now, when the project is done, and you can move on to the next adventure.

4. Relief

The moment you start, you’ll feel better. Maybe a little terrified, but not nearly as vile as you did when you sat fraying and decaying, torn from your inner artist. Writing is returning home to the imagination’s wild oasis, after being banished to the gridded world of squares and rows and spotlessly dull nothings.

5. Irresponsibility

Your characters are so desperate to get on with their lives. Why hold them up any longer? Just hand them the reins; they’ll take it from here.

6. Charge

Attack! Unleash! Explode! Do whatever you must, whatever it takes – but do not relent. Storm the beach! Blast off beyond the horizon of the first draft and relish the ascent! Regret no faltering foot! Hate no harrowing leap!

7. Community

Your readers await you. Your tribespeople, even if they haven’t yet met you – even if they’ve not yet been magnetised, by your creations, into a community of care and shared fascination – wait longingly for your words, for your unique artistic presence. Although they do not know it yet, your readers have been missing you and your stories their entire lives.

8. Inevitability

What's the alternative? To not write?! Pffft! Gimme a break! Get on with it; you know you're not getting by with it.

9. Utility

No one suffers if you write, period. If you do not write, however, you will suffer. Every time. Thus: on the utilitarian account, you should write.

10. Identity

This is who you are. This is your natural, most authentic mode of being. It’s why you love reading so much, and why you crave solitude so often. It’s why you think and feel more deeply than most people. And why not writing ruins your life.

11. Solidarity

You’re not alone in your fear; it is something we share. Every writer feels this, including all your favourite heroes: LeGuin, Hobb, Hall, Penny, Mitchell and the rest. Imagine they’d let it stop them!

12. Increments

Write a word. A few more and you’ve got a sentence. A few of those and it’s a paragraph. Paragraphs make scenes, scenes make chapters. Chapters make books, and books make series. Now go: one word at a time. You can make it a good word later.

13. Trust

The more you trust that your life is worth filling with storytelling, the more you’ll write. The more you write, the more powerful your storytelling will grow. Believe, try; try, improve.

14. Belief

Talent matters little. But curiosity feeds experimentation, passion allows us to relish each moment of creation, and love consoles our fearful inner child.

15. Patience

No one begins a master. We hone our skills through daily devotion and consistent courage. All legends begin as larvae. Even the dragons were once whelps.

16. Synthesis

The story already exists, as a spray of shrapnel scattered across the world. Embark on your quest: seek them out. Connect the dots, assemble the parts. Make wholes of separate bits. You don’t have to come up with anything. You’re not an inventor or conjurer. You’re a collector; you’re a thief.

17. Indulgence

Oh, go on. You know you want to… It can't be that hard to admit you matter enough to use your own talents and explore your own curiosities.

18. Accumulation

Every time you put this off, you make it that much harder to connect with your inner artist. But fortunately, by converse, every time you write, you make it exponentially easier.

19. Limitation

Set a timer. Set a word count. Hit whichever one comes first. Now choose a reward, and a comrade with whom to celebrate your achievement. Then repeat.

20. Pleasure

It's this simple: just have fun. Whatever goes wrong you can fix tomorrow. Mess now; clean up later. Play now; polish later.

21. Joy

You are not your fear of failure or success. You are not your envy of other writers’ accomplishments, you jealousy of non-writers’ damnable casualness. You are not your bitterness about your invisible inner tribulations. You are the gratitude for having this immense wisdom and eloquence, the forgiveness of your waywardness, the excitement for your journey, the humility to take responsibility for every opportunity before you.

22. Momentum

Take a running start: Clear your head with a walk. Read your favourite authors for a few minutes, or another voice relevant to your story. Say a few mantras. Turn on a mood-suite playlist. Flick through provocative images. Watch a scene from a film or a videogame which inspires your sense of drama and narrative energy. Read over yesterday’s writing to anchor you in your story. And there: it’s as if you never even stopped writing.

23. Pain

If you write nothing, nothing will be written. If you write something, something will be written. The pain you feel when not writing is not healthy, not bearable, and certainly not sustainable. Like an Obscurial, it will ruin your life. Nothing that could ever result from abstaining from your art will ever be worth the torturous demise that it took.

24. Authenticity

Perfection never comes. Embrace the odd, the strange, the unkempt, the lopsided, the mismatched, the unwieldy, the rebellious and the idiosyncratic. Who wants to be perfect anyway, when you can be authentic instead?

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