Craft Glossary · term

Drafting / the rough first draft

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Plain English: Getting the whole shape down, badly, all the way to the end. The first draft's only job is to exist so it can be revised. Anne Lamott's "shitty first drafts" and "bird by bird" (one manageable piece at a time) are the canonical permission slips.

Rule: Finish the draft before polishing it. Forward momentum in drafting beats sentence- perfection; you cannot edit a blank page, and you will cut much of what you over-polish.

Fail: Polishing chapter one forty times and never reaching the end ("the perfectionist spiral"). Also: confusing a clean sentence draft with a sound story draft — they're different layers fixed by different passes (see The Editorial Ladder).

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