Roll the dice

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."

Terry Pratchett

Expecting a first draft to be good, is like rolling ten dice and expecting ten sixes.

You might get a few but you won’t hit all ten. Understanding that is half the battle. Said more plainly:

Writing is organised thought. First drafts especially. It takes a while to organise thought into the written word. It doesn’t come out neatly, or fully baked.

You need to re-roll remaining dice, turning ones and twos into sixes.

Each new six makes:

• the vague, specific
• the boring, interesting
• the cliché, novel
• the cluttered, clear
• the lacklustre, captivating
• the questionable, convincing
• the inefficient, efficient
• the vanilla, vivid
• the robotic, human
• the bloated, concise
• the stale, fresh
• the unstructured, structured
  
  

Each re-roll is worth it because each new six improves the likelihood your writing does what you want it to do.

At some point you might have a healthy set of seven or eight dice, all showing a six. You could leave it like that.

Or you could keep rolling until you're battling a final, resistant dice.

Most people stop after the first roll. But how could they ever expect the writing to do its job? It's full of threes.

Most of the work to make writing good is done by re-rolling those dice. The problem is we call it writing, so we stop there.

We’re not taught that good writing comes from rewriting.

Don't worry, it's completely normal. It’s the case for most writers, even the ones who write guides about writing.

This guide has had rounds of re-rolls, I've considered every word, and it would still benefit from more thought.

It's the same for people who've been paid to write for a half a century, like William Zinsser whose fifth drafts have 30% of their words struck through.

50 years.
Fifth draft.
30% struck though.

You should be deleting words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters you spent a long time assembling. Don't succumb to the fallacy of sunk cost. Just because you spent time on it, doesn't mean it should stay.

It might be tangential, repetition, or on reflection, a second rate idea.

Some people never make the first roll because they're scared they won’t hit ten sixes. You can't, so don't try. Be OK with whatever you write first being imperfect.

Roll the ten dice, and keep rolling.

"But John, I can't keep rolling forever. . ."

No, you can't. In fact you mustn’t, because it's the perfect form of procrastination. The type that feels productive. At some point you have to stop rolling and press publish.

And just like the writer and editor living within the same Atomic Author, you’ll have to negotiate with the opposing forces of re-rolling and publishing. There’s no easy answer to the question “is it ready yet?”

By knowing what the point is, and by learning what to cut, and by learning what you could cut that you might keep, you’ll have a better idea of when to publish. Those are tangible things you can measure against.

Just don’t let your first draft become your last draft, because your first draft is always your worst draft.