Fearless drafts

How to cut the shackles on your creativity

The brilliant poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib was the guest on the Longform Podcast the other day. The whole episode is a knockout. He talks about how he decides what to write about, his relationship with his hometown, his rise from a tough background — all things I’ve thought a lot about.

Toward the end he talks about working on a new project, and what it’s like to be in that early stage:

It feels like for me the draft phase has always been where writers get to be fearless and not tentative. And I feel like so often there’s a tentativeness attached to what happens in the draft phase. But for me it’s like, I get to be unafraid here. I get to make mistakes. I get to stumble my way toward something. I get to seek out one good sentence in a fog of 10 bad sentences. And I get to do that. There’s a real pleasure in that. … I am my most unafraid self when I get to revel in the draft phase.

This is exactly the advice I give other writers. The beginning should be a wild time — the time you write what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft,” the time you pull all those crazy clothes out of the closet and see how they look in the mirror.

It’s great advice. I am terrible at taking it.

I tell myself I don’t have a perfectionist streak, but sometimes I get hung up on the first few sentences of a story and can’t move on until they feel just right. The first paragraph of this Dean Smith story took what felt like a week. There aren’t any fancy sentences there. But I reworked them over and over until the paragraph flowed just the way I want it. That’s not ideal. Because I still had a hundred paragraphs to go.

The way that I write best is when I divide myself into two people. The first one has long hair and an old ratty T-shirt and he’s probably a little bit high. That guy lets go of any preconceptions about what anybody else might think, or even what the story should be, and just freestyles it to see where the ideas go. It’s about discovering the story you didn’t even know you had until you wrote it down.

Then, when that’s done, the other guy comes in — the stone sober guy with the button-down and careful hairdo. He’s a fan of the other guy, so he doesn’t want to destroy his work … he just wants to make sure the story is accurate and fair and every word is in its proper place.

The problem is, I too often put the first guy on the bench and let the second guy write the whole story. That’s fear, I think. There’s no telling what wild untamed stuff might come out of my head, and I’m afraid for anybody to see it. Even me.

I’ve never really had writer’s block, but I think writer’s block is an extreme version of fearing the fearless draft. As long as the page is still blank, you haven’t done anything wrong. As soon as you start to fill it up you’re making mistakes. Sometimes that’s too hard to handle — especially when you’re doing something creative and the idea is that it’s supposed to make you feel good.

As you might have heard, because I mention it EVERY SINGLE WEEK in this newsletter, I’m working on a new book about the Westminster Dog Show and the bond between dogs and their people. I’m trying very hard to let the story go where my mind takes it for now, and come back and put a shape on it later. It’s scary as hell. But I’m looking for that fearless feeling Hanif Abdurraqib talks about. I think of it as that moment a skydiver jumps out of a plane. You know there’s a parachute on your back … but for a little while you’re in freefall. People pay a lot of money for that feeling.

The point of all this is, don’t let yourself get stuck at the beginning. Whatever you’re creating, don’t worry about being perfect. The goal is to finish. A C-plus finished work is better than an A-plus beginning that never goes anywhere. See, here we are at the end, and I wasn’t sure how we were going to get here. It wasn’t a beautiful landing, but we made it. And now I wanna go again.