The Bad First Draft

Res Extensa #69 :: Get the ideas out of your head

Nic Pizzolatto wrote arguably the best season of television ever put on screen: the first season of True Detective.

Atmospheric, dark, philosophical. Cary Fukunaga's cinematography and style matches perfectly the brooding tone of Nic's story.

I rewatched it recently for the many-th time and, like most timeless works, enjoyed it even more than previous watches. It got me thinking about how a lone creator conceives of an original story that's so coherent, tight, with nothing of excess, nothing out of place, and every moment contributing to the whole. Eight hours of screentime, and hardly a second expendable or worthless.

How did it go from an original one-liner idea to the paragon of storytelling it is?

In this interview, Pizzolatto talks about his writing process, and said something that resonated with me:

“When I do script-writing, they're all bad the first time. I mean, I bust through a bad first draft, so that I can begin to take apart what exactly I'm meant to be getting at. I need the stuff I put down, and the characters I create to teach me about what I am creating.”

A masterpiece of writing begins life as a "bad first draft." Any creative work begins its journey as a mess of contradictory directions that you then shape toward something coherent and meaningful. You have to get out of your own way and give your brain space to set down a first version.

Of course this has analogs outside of writing, too. When I'm thinking through how to approach a furniture build, or a new software feature, or a presentation I have to give, it always starts with a blank page and simple first passes sketched out freeform. When it works, I start out with almost literally incomprehensible scribbles in a notebook that then evolve toward something sensible.

Complex things must begin life as simple things. Great drafts begin as bad ones.

But it's not like I don't suffer from creative blocks to the Bad First Draft. It's dispiriting to think that you’ll have to delete parts of your idea — "But I'll do all this writing / drafting / testing, then what if it's all trash? What if I have to backspace over all of it?" The proponent of the Bad First Draft would tell you: the bad, early iterations only get better when they can be iterated on outside of your mind. You have to give yourself freedom to get started without the fear of your first few attempts burdening future iterations. You’ve got to be okay with tossing elements of bad early drafts in the trash. Throwing something away is much easier when it’s early and you haven’t spent too much time yet. Being too precious or overwrought too early can hamstring you from making the necessary cuts and reworks.

There's a paradoxical quality to creative work. The process of working on it informs what it even is. It helps you refine what it needs to become. To know what to build, you have to start building. The Bad First Draft is just the prototype. No one need see it but you.

Another creator that contrasts Pizzolatto's process in certain ways, but complements in others, is Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman In Moscow. His process is more methodical, but points to the same idea of kickstarting the engine. He gives a detailed summary of his creative process in this interview with

David Perell

. Rather than taking a continuous, linear path through his entire story, he visualizes individual scenes and moments and writes them in notebooks over the course of a long time before he starts writing:

“…I will do that for a couple of years. So at the end of a couple of years, I'll have a couple of notebooks filled with handwritten descriptions of what happens in the book. And only when I know everything that's going to happen in the book, and I can visualize it all do I then start writing chapter one...”

His "bad first draft" is an accumulation of individual moments collected on index cards and notebooks. There's no burden of early on having to figure out how it all hangs together. He pours out his ideas, outlines, then writes:

“I'm an outliner. That's what I am — I plan, design, and outline before I start writing. That can sound like it's very left-brained: very analytical, very precise, very organized. The reason that I do that, though, is in order to free up the right side of my brain when I'm in the writing process, the right side being the more subconscious, more dream-oriented, more poetic side of the brain. If I have not figured out all these details, what does the room look like? Who's there? What's their background? What happens if I haven't figured out that? When I'm writing, that's the part of my brain that has to be in full action, figuring out all these elements with the story and it dampens the poetic side of the consciousness. So the more I know, the more I can then reduce the interaction of the analytical side of my brain and free up the poetic side to take over.”

Sometimes what gets us hung up early in the creative process is overconcern for the finished product too early. Rather than focusing on getting the ideas out there to play with, we're simultaneously concerned with the flow, the style, the editing, the final narrative. But there's no reason to expect that in those first few moments the thing we produce is anywhere near the final product.

Both of these writers, from different angles, point to the idea of movement. The Bad First Draft gets the clay on the table, with the freedom to start molding.

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Thanks for reading. If you found this useful or interesting, please share with your friends, connections, and colleagues. What sorts of tactics do you use to get yourself moving on a new work? Leave me a comment below — would love to hear feedback.