Quotes & Sayings About First Draft

I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months ... Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity. — Stephen King

Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not. — Chuck Wendig

Journalism is not easy. It's the first rough draft. I don't think you need to wait around until you have the definitive thing. You record what's there; don't delude yourself that this is the ultimate historical view. — Harold Evans

But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear, — Pat Schneider

I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years. — Poppy Z. Brite

Hardly anything is as exciting or as diverse, as strong a confirmation of life and hope and the universe's urge towards creativity, as a lively compost heap or the first draft of a novel. — Margaret Simons

Thanks to Lawrence Jacobs, world's most enthusiastic and supportive spouse, who read the first draft of this book and said, I'm glad we have different last names. — Julie Schumacher

I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out. — Laurie Foos

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts. — Judy Blume

(The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.) — Matt Haig

I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft. — Richard Greenberg

Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It's taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we'll see whatever happens with that. — Ethan Suplee

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit. — Patricia Hickman

A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs. — James A. Owen

What goes around comes around. Karma. Ying and Yang. Two sides to every coin. With every action there is an opposite action. It doesn't matter how you say it, it all means the same thing.

What we put out in the world will be what we get back. In my writing, as well as in my life, I want my second side to reflect my first. And it's not going to be determined by how many books I have on the shelf or who I sat next to at that luncheon. It's going to come from how I treated the person who has just finished her first draft of her first book and the person who just opened his forty-seventh rejection."

~Lessons From the Giants, 2002 — Jacqui Jacoby

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do
then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected. — Tennessee Williams

The Kyoto Treaty wasn't perfect, but we signed it, in fact, helped to draft it. And I'm very proud of it, it was the world's first commitment to doing something comprehensive on greenhouse gases and trying to reduce global warming before we do irreversible damage to many civilizations around the world. — William J. Clinton

I think the biggest thing for me now is that I have a better understanding of what to expect as far as things go and the scheduling. Your first year is a little crazy because you are preparing for the draft and don't know where you will be playing. — Giovani Bernard

It's important to put aside your internal editor and just get words down on the page when working on a first draft. — S.J. Scott

Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept. — Chris Wedge

Somedays you have to write even when you think you're putting out crap. You just need to tell yourself that you'll fix the problems later, and by then, they might not even be "problems" anymore. The challenge of writing a novel has always been to let loose with a beautifully flawed first draft, and to constantly fight belief you're chiseling words in stone each time you type. — Christopher Rice

Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft - one of them, anyway - is to make that something even more clear. This may necessitate some big changes and revisions. The benefits to you and your reader will be clearer focus and a more unified story. It hardly ever fails. — Stephen King

The men who wrote the First Amendment religion clause did not view paid legislative chaplains and opening prayers as a violation of that amendment ... the practice of opening sessions with prayer has continued without interruption ever since that early session of Congress. It can hardly be thought that in the same week the members of the first Congress voted to appoint and pay a chaplain for each House and also voted to approve the draft of the First Amendment ... (that) they intended to forbid what they had just declared acceptable. — Warren E. Burger

I do a nice sloppy first draft like everybody else. And then just work at it and work at it and groom it. I get input from other people. — Diablo Cody

To have someone like Clint Eastwood come along and shoot your first draft as written is just any screenwriter's dream. And Clint is very straightforward. If it's good enough to get his attention, it's good enough to produce. — J. Michael Straczynski

I came up and was a first-round draft pick and there was a lot of hype and a lot of expectation, and I enjoyed that. Have I also seen the other side of that? Absolutely. — Pat Burrell

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first. — Brit Marling

Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat - chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange. — Don Roff

Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. — Elliott Colla

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay. — Terry Tempest Williams

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window. — Alan Moore

Although Herbert Hoover in many ways prefigured him, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who first tried to create an explicit corporate state in America with his National Recovery Administration (NRA). With its fascist-style Blue Eagle emblem, the NRA coordinated big business and labor in a central plan, and outlawed competition. The NRA even employed vigilante groups to spy on smaller businesses and report if they violated the plan. Just as in Mussolini's Italy, the beneficiaries of the U.S. corporate state were - in addition to the government itself - established economic interest groups. NRA cheerleaders included the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, the United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and - above all - Gerard Swope of General Electric, who helped draft the NRA act. Only — Ludwig Von Mises

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven. — Dorothy Parker

First of all, I want to thank the Buccaneers for giving me the opportunity and for picking me in the draft. This is the nature of the beast, though, and this is a new start for me. I wish them the best of luck, and I am just glad to be a Bear. — Gaines Adams

History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised.
The Confessions are Augustine's own first draft of history. — James O'Donnell

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read. — John Irving

The first draft you're pretty much on your own, so I love that. I can let my imagination go wild. I just go crazy. Then, over the years - it takes years to write these things, to make these things come to pass - there are many, many, many drafts. For Maleficent, there were at least 15. — Linda Woolverton

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with. — Matt Hughes

The first draft of a story is the writer's clay. — Bruce Coville

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft. — Tobsha Learner

I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft. — Tess Gerritsen

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce.
... how to set yourself spinning? — Annie Dillard

I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire. — Robin Wasserman

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't - I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere - but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on. — David Sedaris

MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT. — Various

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff. — Lauren Groff

I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke. — Wes Craven

Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always angsty when I'm working my way through a first draft. — Marie Lu

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft. — Terry Pratchett

You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed. — William Monahan

The first draft often is really fast, and I'd be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it. — Jonathan Dee

When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained. — Heidi Julavits

Suzanne [Collins] was very involved in the development of the script. She wrote the first draft. She was very involved with Billy Ray, when he wrote his draft. — Nina Jacobson

WHEN GOD CREATED ROBOT SOULS HAVE NO SOIL WHEN FIRST CHISELED. SO,HOW,IT IS FELT AS COMMITTED &CONVICTED BAD OR GOOD DEEDS OF CREATURES.TO DRAFT CYCLIC BIRTHS FATE.IS IT NOT DIVINE WILL & PLEASURE SELF DECISION.????????? — Various

His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything. — Hilary Mantel

You know how sometimes you're talking to people who love you and give you unconditional love, and you say, "But you know what? Let me back up. I forgot to say ... "You can do that, right? You don't hesitate and say, "Oh my God! I forgot to say that!". You just speak! And you say it all, until you have nothing more to say. And that's your first draft. It's done. — Sandra Cisneros

You want to come in and prove yourself early. Obviously, it is a responsibility being drafted that high to come in and play well and to make an impact. If not, youre going to get cut. So you have to come in, make the team, have an impact and do something special. And I feel that, obviously, internally. I feel an obligation to myself to do that but obviously the organization, the fans, this community. I mean, they dont want to see a first-round draft pick be a bust, so I feel I have to come in and hopefully make an impact early. — A. J. Hawk

33/ Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick. — Kim Addonizio

The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later. — Jill McCorkle

I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish. — Donald Ray Pollock

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln's Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer's rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

There is no such thing as a publishable first draft. — William Targ

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us - to write the first draft and then return for the second draft - we are doing the work of memory. — Patricia Hampl

'Rent' was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me. — Stephen Chbosky

Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by typewriter or word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and the revise; others can't write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first.

But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. — William Zinsser

To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft. — J.J. Abrams

We don't claim perfection; even the best journalism is but a first draft of history. But we bring to the challenge certain basic beliefs that aren't much in fashion these days. We believe facts are facts and that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting. We thus believe that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral. News, in short, is not merely a matter of views. And truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.
[Letter From the Publisher: A Report to The Wall Street Journal's Readers, 12 January, 1993] — Peter R. Kann

I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging. — Gore Vidal

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts. — Philip Roth

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft. — Alain De Botton

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained. — Anne Lamott

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek. — Lydia Davis

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm. — Christos Tsiolkas

Life is a first draft ... with NO rewrite. — George Bernard Shaw

Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is - sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes. — John Gardner

I work sometimes from outlines, which are immediately abandoned. Sometimes, when I'm trying to find the characters, I'll sketch things out a bit. Sometimes, outlines help me aim a little bit, but I tend to find it's usually much more interesting, especially with the first draft, to spew it onto the page. I used to get very nervous that, if I write this first rough draft and I die that night, whoever finds it might think that I thought it was good. For me, it's much more important to get some general shape onto the page and later take all the time I need to refine it, fix it, and rewrite it. — Paul Rudnick

When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that. — Heidi Julavits

Whenever I teach writing I tell them to never revise as you go. Finish the first draft. This is my writing advice. I can't do that myself. I'm lying to everybody. I write a paragraph, and then I rewrite that paragraph. I want to feel like I'm standing on firm ground before I move on to the next paragraph. Mentally, I have to do that. — Matt De La Pena

Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies. — Jonathan Stroud

It's not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls "reverse dominance hierarchies" in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It's uncannily similar to Marx's dream of the "dictatorship of the proletariat.")34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It's a great example of how "innate" refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it's a mistake to look at today's hunter-gatherers and say, "See, that's what human nature really looks like! — Jonathan Haidt

Your first attempt will be terrible ... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft ... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while. — Pamela Druckerman

Gaiman wrote the first draft in fountain pen, in several five-hundred-page, leather-bound sketchbooks that he purchased in a close-out sale. "I really wanted a second draft," says the author. "It's my experience with computers that they do not give you a second draft. Computers give you an ongoing, ever-improving first draft. — Hank Wagner

I had finished the first draft of 'Life As We Knew It' before Katrina hit, and it was startling to see things I wrote about actually happening in the real world. — Susan Beth Pfeffer

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. — Susan Sontag

I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn't thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It's like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great. — Caleb J. Ross

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing. — John Niven

Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community's own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe. — Ian Kershaw

In the NFL you get one first-round draft pick if you're lucky. You couldn't really outwork anybody else. In college I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year. — Nick Saban

Draft Three
Because I never realized that you could fall in love with humans the same way you fall in love with songs. How the tune of them could mean nothing to you at first, an unfamiliar melody, but quickly turn into a symphony carved across your skin; a hymn in the web of your veins; a harmony stitched into the lining of your soul — Krystal Sutherland

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done. — Heidi Julavits

I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week. — George Stephen

Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how. — Nancy Kress

Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor. — David Sedaris

Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don't be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love. — Francesca Lia Block

Ideas come at any moment
except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.
My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done. — Chuck Palahniuk

The EU Constitution is something new in human history. Though it is not as eloquent as the French and U.S. constitutions, it is the first governing document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness. The language throughout the draft constitution speaks of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit. — Jeremy Rifkin

The first draft is your "vomit onto the keyboard" draft, wherein your task is to simply keep moving and outrun your doubts. — Sean Platt

In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948. — Rene Cassin

Being a first-round draft pick means nothing to me without my education. — Cardale Jones

I'll play a character who is getting married to a woman to avoid the draft. Ultimately they fall in love with each other, but at first it's only out of practicality. — Elijah Wood