Writing a shitty first draft

first draft

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog!

Today, I want to talk about shitty first drafts and what it means to cope with first-draft situations.

Yes, because I’m 15 000 words into one of these myself and I’m fretting about it. And, yes. Because I need to find a way to cope with uncertainty so I figured that, maybe so do you.

Or a zero draft, as I heard Kate Cavanaugh from You Tube channel Kate Cavanaugh Writes call it. [Check it out, it’s a good channel to get me inspired for writing and think about writing themes.]

I keep repeating to myself, almost chanting if I’m being honest, that it’s okay to write a shitty first draft.

That I need to put something on the page.

That it doesn’t matter what I write on that first draft because it will be worked on, improved and thoroughly revised.

That without something on the page I have no chance to improve nothing… because there is nothing to improve upon.

[See? I’m almost making a song lyrics out of this. Just need the right tune]

I keep reminding myself of that chapter of ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott…

anne lamott shitty first drafts

At least, I know I keep repeating all of that to myself every time I’m in that phase of the process where I need to produce a first draft. And it’s truly alright to write a shitty first draft.

It’s not my first roundabout on first-draft-land. But it’s always tricky to drive in such a bumpy, too large, full of holes road… and it’s a roundabout, so I am to expect some curves and bad angles and some drivers out of their lanes.

I have done this first draft thing in the long format form for six times now.

I’m counting all of my finished novels, including a published one. But I’m not counting any other form of my writings, which all of them took a first-draft phase, including this article I’m currently writing, and that you are currently reading.

Maybe I should consider these also… and, suddenly, my life is made of first-drafts.

This is my seventh first draft and here I am, in overwhelm-land.

It still gets me every time. Six books in and I don’t feel prepared for this part of the process.

It’s like I keep looking for things that aren’t quite worked out yet to keep myself in the overwhelm state. I look at this first draft and wish I could make it perfect… as it is, and knowing very well that there is no such thing as perfect, I’m sustaining the eyes wide open, rapid breathing pattern and in a constant arrhythmia state, ready to flee or pass out (still haven’t decided which one yet).

But I’m not here to complain. Truly, I am not. I’m here to share that this is hard but that I can, and I will persist. And so will you.

After all, I have done it six times already for my novels and a few hundred times for all of my other writing works, like short-stories, poems, blog posts and any sort of creative texts.

I also know that, this too will pass.

I know I’ll end up moving forward, plowing ahead, or tiptoeing around obstacles. Or finding some mental assurances and some strategies to make myself cope with the first-draft situation.

Sometimes coping means:

  • writing my book plans in really big paper sheets. 
  • constructing cards for my characters.
  • writing every scene in a A5 card and have a visual of the story entirety.
  • even writing one version of it by hand in some lame notebook. 
  • enrol in any challenge that makes me forget the thing in itself and make me show up to the work (I am so doing #the100daychallenge that starts in Feb.22).

I’m even considering using the foolscap method, a Steven Pressfield’s suggestion (watch a quick introduction in his Instagram Reels).

Or any other strategy that I feel can help me cope, in this moment, with the uncertainty of it all.

Something like, remind myself why I’m writing this story. Why I’m involved in it. Why my creative path lead me here. And how I felt with a finished book in my hands (not literally).

And maybe get back to the drawing board. To plan my scenes in some way that helps me do this first-draft.

So, I have options. The only option I don’t have is to quit. And neither do you.

I’ll leave you with another inspirational quote:

writing a novel

Just keep driving!

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

***

References: 

Marketing Writings and work out the Work

marketing writings

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog!

Let’s talk about writing!… and how Marketing our work affects our Writings, and how our Writings affect our Marketing work.

As authors we have a difficult time in cramming all the work we have ongoing into our daily live’s, and still keep ourselves motivated and inspired to write.

At least, this is how I feel.

There are too many things to consider, too many things to learn, too many projects I wish to devote myself to, and I find it hard to put in the good work in all of them at the same time.

We must be a Jack-of-all-trades in order to do a, let’s be truthful, mediocre job at most of the tasks we have going on. We may be savvy in some things but we lack in others… like technical skills, for example.

Or we can spend lot’s of money, that we usually don’t have to begin with, in order to outsource those tasks that can be done by others. And spend more time doing all the research and trial to find some decent professionals to do them for us.

Which would be a nice to have, but it’s not doable for the initial (big) part of the time we take pursuing our dreams.

Marketing is one of those tasks

We find it simple enough to do it ourselves, so we start dabbling in it, and start seeing the immensity of juggling all of it ourselves.

But we need to know a few things first.

Learning the foundations of usable images, formatting, creating online content, sharing throughout platforms, helpful apps and gadgets, and all sorts of things that are needed, just to be able to do a somewhat decent job.

Decent, but only after a few years of a learning curve, or a steep few months if we have the strength for it.

I know this reality. I have been dancing to this tune for fifteen or more years.

Marketing is Images

First it was the images issue. All images had author rights associated and this implies having another cost. While starting a blog as a marketing tool, we have to produce content always accompanied by good, relevant, beautiful images. So I needed the images and had a passion for creating them. Uniting both I created my own images library.

So I worked my way into creating my own visual content, including all the images for each blog post.

Marketing is Brand

Also on the brand, constructing it made me meddle with logos and brand images. I got to learn how to develop the online presence imagery that I use, and spruce up when needed.

A few years ago, I discovered a new online design tool (canva.com) which gave me a lot more leverage to work on my visual content. I have learn a bit of Photoshop, back in the day, but I have never mastered anything but the strict basics of it. Also Gimp wasn’t friendly enough for me.

With Canva I got to experiment a thousand ways to create content and still use it daily.

At the same time, I had concerns about formatting the whole thing, about headlines creation, about visual presentation, tags, niche audience, and so much more. And I’m kind of allergic to SEO! Not that I don’t use it. I try to.

Marketing is Social Media

It has been a slow, but very rewarding, struggle managing all the need to know’s about the marketing experience connected to my blogs and online presence. I have been experimenting different social media tools and online presences and it requires focus and effort.

Marketing is Effective Writing

Permanently underlying all of this is the need to write good articles.

Marketing is supposed to be an accessory to our writing. It is not. It’s a full, complex, independent area of knowledge. And learn to write copy is hard work.

Writing blog posts, articles of sorts, is another type of writing that needed to be studied, and enhanced with practice. Even blog titles have a spin to it that needs to be learned.

As for my writing articles practice, I will not call them great content because until this day, my blogues remain the desired blog experience, not quite Content, focusing on sharing my experience through the meanderings of the writing dream, not the ‘build a business type of blog‘. And I do enjoy to write for my blogs. 

Yes, I would like to have some revenue, sustaining my twenty year efforts and allowing myself to continue doing this thing I love the most: writing on its different formats.

I find that I like to put in the work but lack in other aspects.

After all, the writing dream does come with major costs associated, but I’m always struggling with how real my content is, opposed to the ‘How to write a best-seller in two days’ mentality.

And these views of the matter don’t produce good marketing content, do they? Trying to inspire others to pursue their dreams is not the same thing as promising them magical improvements by reading a single blog post.

A ‘write better’ article, a ‘devote more time to your writing’ or a ‘read from better sources’ aren’t appealing. People like to have it simple, not too much work, without too much pain. And we all know how that saying goes… 

Marketing is Blogging

Since my first days blogging, I wanted a platform for my voice, my writing voice, and the cheap-online-business model will never do it for me. Blogging is supposed to add value, inspiring others to pursue their creative callings, not take it away. Not frustrating readers when the promise on life changing magic doesn’t appear.

All I ever wanted was to add value. To help someone in the pursue of their dreams, if possible.

We can teach how to put in the time to do better, but we cannot make it magically better just by existing. You have to put in the time and effort to do it.

Just like writing fiction, or non-fiction, or in any any form or genre that we may devote ourselves into. For example, writing a book is long, hard work. And also, very fun work. If we let it be so.

Marketing is Exposure

With all of this in mind, Marketing and how to grow the exposure to what I write, is very relevant.

Choosing my platforms, my public voice, working on my content, devoting myself to my writing practices, and trying to see a bit further away than today’s viewpoint, are constant efforts.

[So I resent it immensely when the players change the game, no warnings offered, in what seems to serve only big commercial self-interests. Yes, things change, tools evolve, social media is the golden egg chicken which needs to prevail through time… and it needs to evolve to prevail. But it has evolved poorly.

And, I know that all of the things we use freely aren’t free. I am the commodity, the product, the final endgame for them is to make money out of my needs.

We need it to reach other people that maybe would like to see what we have to offer. But no ‘buying space‘ = noalgorythming‘. But I’m digressing here…]

Marketing our work, on top of all the Real Work we have to put in to create our Life’s Work, is a conundrum of sorts.

No one will do it better than ourselves. Nobody knows our book better. Nobody knows our message better. Nobody knows what we like better.

Marketing is Connection

Marketing end’s up being just me and my big dream, fighting to get it to other people, so they can find some value and maybe inspire them to pursue their dream.

Not just sharing for vanity, but always searching to add something that others can use in their creative pursuits. Even if it doesn’t seem obvious.

Not just creating different iterations of the same well studied booklet, but offering a personal view. Not just copying the trendy stuff but making our own possibilities of trendy.

Truly knowing what we want to write about, and how to go about it, is a good strategy for finding a Marketing that works for our projects… to find a Marketing that works for our Work.

We may find the commercial side of things is the way to go but we need to have the skills for it. Or develop them.

It’s like learning to walk again. We will get up and fall down. We will take a step forward and stumble. We will manage to stay upright a few more moments at a time. And even after we have learned to walk, we need to find our balance and to avoid the slippery patches, and not run ourselves into walls and street posts.

Marketing is Learning

Marketing is showing how to register all of that process, how to paint our travelling experience in a captivating way, how to make others come together in communities of sorts.

It’s a hard and fun job. Even if accumulating with all sorts of other tasks. Like writing our books.

Quick question: How can we marketing what doesn’t exist yet?

See?! Another conundrum of sorts…

What’s your marketing strategy? How do you deal with the cheap feeling of pushing your work? How do you balance time for all of the works you have to do?

Leave the comments below. We would like to talk about this more.

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

***

Self-taught work and making our way through this life

self-taught

We learn to write in school. Most of us did, anyway.

There we learned the basics, did the work to acquire what was on the school program, and become functional in this area of knowledge.

We read the required works and, if we are lucky, we find some books that hook us into reading outside school… and if we are really lucky, we start to enjoy all the written papers we are assigned to do, and all chances to try new things out in this domain.

This was how I started to like poetry. By myself and having the opportunity to use it on school papers.

But when school is over, and college options were not our heart’s choices, we get to real life and start realising that if we want to know more about one particular subject, we have to go find the information by ourselves…

There will be no more holding hands to help us cross the street.

At the time most of us didn’t know we should have chosen other path more aligned with our personal tastes. And surely didn’t know that we should learn for and by ourselves.

Corporate life gives us a good once over on fitting in, not on being our best and standing out. And during the first decade of it we still had dreams. We worked in a kind of well paid, for the current standards, corporate job and took every hit in the head, believing that it was what we were supposed to do.

All that we learn, serves us. Nobody can open our heads in half and stuck information there for us to use later.

Maybe we have more inclination to learn certain things, or find more pleasure in knowing more about this, and not so much about that. And this is okay. We should choose to learn primarily things that we like.

But we also have a fair amount of will to accept that learning some things require a little more effort on our part.

And this may not be easy but it is essential to get to where we want to be. We have to go through a lot of new experiences to find out the right moment and the process that works for us.

For me, it happened with blogs and social media, and now it evolved to other kinds of platforms with different ways, but the same purposes.

I like to think of myself as a self-taught person in many ways. An autodidact in my arts and life. After all, I do not have any special training in writing, mixed media drawings, crafting, photography, filming, or any of the other things I love to do and keep learning about.

I just had a need, and the will to pursue its basics, in order to learn what I thought I needed at the time.

Hell, sometimes I find myself quite innocently in most worldly subjects and have no other choice but to learn by force. But this is another subject altogether.

We can only see what we see. There are no fast track to encompass all learnings and become wise.

And it’s these things that I incline myself towards that are the most enjoyable to learn, even if they’re not the easiest ones.

I have taught myself how to write all my life. Through books, practicing my craft, online courses, other writers, writing and researching about writing.

I have taught myself how to create and maintain a blog. Even a bit of code, when needed. I have taught myself to grow through all my blogs.

I have taught myself to use design tools and to curate my own content.

I have taught myself how to take photographs for specific purposes. Finding what serves the things I’m interested about, in a non-commercial kind of way. All my content is an expression on myself as an individual.

I have taught myself how to make, and edit videos, how to use different software to support the blog and online presence, social media need-to-knows, and I keep investigating other things.

I find that my writing requires more than just a half a dozen novels, a pile of short-stories or some poetry available in print.

And I am always trying to incorporate value through these other parts of my craft that I came to see as parts of my writing.

Is it perfect? Hell, no! But I show up everyday, determined to learn and to do my best.

This text right here is one more piece of this enormous puzzle. I have been in love with the English language since I learned to read and write. I practiced both Portuguese, through school, and English, by my own will.

I read tons in English and sometimes have trouble in known how to translate words from EN to PT, which usually gets me the evil eye from people around me…

Sometimes I find myself wishing I could write more in my second, that sometimes feels like my first, language. But my blog is mainly in Portuguese safe for a few English articles that I managed to squeeze in now and then.

And I haven’t been able to muster the courage to devote myself to a new blog. One that would have fewer traction and a worldly competition.

And I finally Have sent all those thoughts to hell.

So here I am, in a writer.sarafarinha.com virtual space, hoping to share some of my writing boggles, achievements and challenges and truly hoping to hear some of yours.

And here I am, finishing my first english written book (with 77600 words for now), the first of what I intend to be a trilogy.

Self-taught is the way!

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼