NaNoWriMo is in full swing, and I’m here today to convince you to just start writing, even if you haven’t planned or plotted or thought about your characters or finished your research. Why? Because there’s nothing as powerful as a messy first draft.
Dear impossibly long and jumbled collection of sentence fragments and unfinished scenes and bits of character sketches and snatches of dialogue and possible back stories, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways… Here are five arguments for messy first drafts.
1. No matter how good your first draft is, it’s going to need editing.
I always say that no one but your cat should be reading your first drafts. A first draft will. Need. Editing. Getting your first draft down messier and faster just means you can get to the editing part of the process sooner.
2. When you try to write something that’s neat and tidy, you’re writing from a place of judgment.
You’re considering your words and thoughts and ideas from your audience’s point of view while they’re still tiny drops of inspiration in your head. You’ll end up “editing” many wonderful sparks of creativity out of your writing by not even putting them down on paper to begin with. By insisting on perfect prose, you’ve put a limit on your most valuable resource: your beautiful, miraculous brain!
3. Writing about your ideas before they’re fully formed gives them a chance to grow and mature.
Once that “silly idea” that you almost didn’t write down is on paper, you can riff on it, return to it, fully examine it, look at it in relation to other things that might be on your page or in your mind, and who knows, it might actually reveal the core of your story.
4. Writing is thinking.
The best stories are not just beautifully written, they are also meaningful at their core: the plot is underpinned by a realistic character who undergoes an emotional arc, and an overarching message about the world is supported by themes and imagery. This stuff can be hard to come up with, and even harder to connect into one cohesive story. But messy drafts are a great way to mine this gold from your heart and mind.
How? When you first get a thought or feeling or inclination down on paper, it may be fuzzy and undefined, because your brain is an amazing network of (often) invisible connections. But the act of writing is the act of drawing outlines around the fuzzy things and creating parameters and definitions. Because when you’re forced to wrestle with your words, changing them again and again until they say exactly what you mean, you are engaging with those words (and the ideas they represent) at a truly deep level. By the time you find the right words, you’ll have a better understanding of that idea, what you know about it, what you don’t know, how you feel about it, and why. This reckoning with ideas in relation to your plot and characters is a fantastic way to get at the core ideas of your story!
(An aside: This point about writing as thinking is why so many creatives and knowledge workers only use AI for extremely limited use cases. Letting AI “polish” or “edit” your writing deprives you of your God-given opportunity to think deeply and surrenders your right to imperfect but truly personal expression.)
5. Giving yourself permission (and even encouragement!) to write a messy first draft means starting writing and, therefore, defeating the procrastination demons.
I think we have all put off starting a task indefinitely because we’re still “researching” or “in the planning stages.” Begin your messy draft, keep writing, and tell your procrastination monster that it might be time for them to consider other career options. 🙂
Happy NaNoWriMo! May Allah bless you all and your pens!
Written by Jessica Hassan, Associate Editor of Daybreak Press