Death by First Draft

Salvador Dalí “Savage Beasts in the Desert”

The journey from the first word in the first draft to the last word in the perfect version is vast and confusing. It’s a deadly journey through the wild west. Many have crossed it and arrived victorious. But many more have died trying. Ride out far enough into the territory, under a sky bleached white by the heat, and you’ll see what’s lining the road: dry canteens with their caps unscrewed, tumbleweeds blowing past, a revolver unfired with the chamber still full, and then the skulls (picked clean) of writers who never published.

They didn’t die in shootouts like legendary cowboys. They could’ve been victorious cowboys publishing perfect novels. Instead, they died intimidated before their first shitty drafts. If you’re one of them, helpless, thirsty, dying on the side of the road, get your act together.

We don’t have weak people on this Substack. We are strong, independent, mildly caffeinated cowboys who don’t write with AI. We are here for a battle, and the battle (sadly) is harder than a duel at high noon. A duel takes ten seconds. This takes five days. Every month. For the next 12 months? Top-tier Western cowboys write every day for the rest of their lives (Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdi). We are not that. We are bougie Brooklyn Heights 2026 cowboys that are just trying to survive, and our ambition is calibrated accordingly — at least in the short term.

Here is my plan: I’ll publish 500 words a day for the next five days, and I’ll try to do this every month. In a year, I’ll end up with sixty short shitty first drafts. I have higher ambitions than that, but I don’t want to die a perfectionist. “Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism.” I read that in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which I finished last month and loved. It’s full of gentle advice that soothes the harshness of the self-doubt and self-loathing that come with writing. I plan to put it into practice as I build a writing habit here. Some of the advice that feels most relevant to me in this phase:

I don’t need to have a clear idea before I write. I write to gain clarity along the way. And I’ll build that clarity one short paragraph at a time. This is true for both fiction and non-fiction. Lamott quotes E. L. Doctorow here: “Writing is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way”. She says, “This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard,” and I agree.

Can I sit down at my desk and imagine that I’m just fingers acting as a typist for my brain? A good typist just listens. That’s easy. I can just let my fingers listen to my brain, and voila, myself with her ego and self-judgment all disappear, and instead appear my first shitty draft. This shity first draft is “the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental, where you check every tooth to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.” I’ll try as much as possible to only post third drafts here. And I expect that today I’m a dusty cowboy on foot, taking a few slow steps at a time. In six months, maybe I’ll have a horse.