Craft of Writing: Write garbage, edit later.

Hi there!

It's been a while. I've been struggling on a lot of fronts right now. Things are beginning to settle down again, though. While I have the chance, I wanted to say something important. Remember your first draft is going to be garbage compared to your final draft. That doesn't mean your first draft is entirely awful. It is just very rough and needs to be polished and cleaned up.

Some drafts are rougher than others. Some drafts are so entirely rough that they get shoved into a drawer and forgotten for a few years. Then you may drag them back out and blow the dust off only to put it back in the drawer. That's ok. An author I knew once who lived in the northern part of Ireland (he wrote poetry and fiction as a hobby) said that sometimes a work needs to mature like fine whiskey.

Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet who is far more famous than the guy I knew only as Puck, described it like the work of digging potatoes. Digging potatoes is hard work. Sorting out potatoes from rocks is mind numbing. In the end, the potatoes may seem like they're just too much work because of how much effort it takes to get them up out of the ground, washed, and ready to cook. The nice thing about potatoes is they can sit for a little bit so you don't have to cook them right today.

Planting the potatoes and growing the plant is writing that first draft. From the top side, a potato plant isn't very impressive. It is just a bunch of leaves. The work of editing and rewrites is digging up those potatoes. Getting them washed up and ready for sale, that's obviously the part where you get yourself a nice little bit of legwork going on the publication process. But even if the potatoes still have dirt on them, they can sit in your cellar for a little while as you work on planting something else.

So, grow those lumpy looking potatoes and dig them up when you're ready. Because potatoes do ok in the dirt for a little while and will get a bit better for it sometimes.