@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 3:30

Writing Life | Shitty First Drafts

article image placeholderMorning writing
Revising is this new direction I'm taking and this new material even good. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All just excuses not to keep going. And then I remembered s***** first drafts by Ann Lamont, and I told myself I give myself permission to write the shittiest pros I have ever written in my life, and it worked after the first two pages of what felt really uncomfortable

https://s.swell.life/SSIbhrXqvCXWL8l

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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:08

https://s.swell.life/SSIbi0pkmsXov90

Here's the link to more about Ann Lamont and her book Bird by Bird, and S***** First Draft. If you need some inspiration
@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:17

Shitty first draft excerpt!

I also wanted to share just a bit from part of my s***** first drafts last night, because why not? So these are two characters who are encountering each other again in after a number of years, Levi puts the record on and turns the volume as loud as it can go on my traveling player. He sits next to me on the opposite side of the bed, because other than the floor, there's nowhere else to go
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@bookishpodcast
Shahnaz Ahmed
@bookishpodcast · 3:09

Congratulations 🍾

But I just think we should write just because we want to, just because it's fun. And who cares whether it's s***** or if someone's going to say something, just do it. Just do it. Write your draft. S***** first draft. S***** second draft
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@Raretodd
Todd Wiese
@Raretodd · 0:47

@bowie Great work!

Bowie that was not s*****. That was really good. If that's s*****. I'd love to hear what edited the edited version. Sounds like that was great. Need to get back to writing. I used to write all the time but that self doubt creeps in and I keep writing about how much I want to write stuff and I'm just writing about not writing anything because I tried free writing and that doesn't work
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@Swell
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

Welcome to Swell!

@Shawn_Christy
Shawn Schepps
@Shawn_Christy · 0:24
First drafts definitely suck. Especially if you don't have an outline, which is why I always have an outline. But they still suck. They are the blueprint of what your piece will become. That's how I like to think of it anyway
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@topgold
Bernie Goldbach
@topgold · 1:52

@bowie while teaching college students ...

Though. Yeah, I teach a group of students, about 35 of them how to maintain a Journal, a media writing Journal. And I have them for a semester. I can normally give ten topics that that have to be included in the Journal. It can be illustrated, and half the students I have are animators, so they illustrate them or they can be bullet points
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@Shawn_Christy
Shawn Schepps
@Shawn_Christy · 1:45
I love the name Bowie. I would tell them they're going to fail the class if they don't do the f****** work teaching. I've had a master's program, Ram and Screenwriting in North Carolina at an art school, and when they didn't get the work done, I would ask them why. And they would tell me why. I would say that's just not a good enough reason
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:50

@bookishpodcast ☺️

And I know we've talked about this before, but just that doing a little bit each day adds up, and it's just such a fulfilling process, even when it's really hard. So thank you for sharing. And I would love to hear an excerpt from the book you're working on. If you ever feel inspired to share a little piece that's that you're feeling good about or you feel like it's representative of what you're trying to do with it
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:24

@Raretodd https://s.swell.life/SSJMgSh605PFttv

And I try to remember a lot, and I'm reminded by other writers a lot that those fallow periods are really important when you're feeling kind of stuck, or maybe you're just journaling or taking notes or just reading a lot. And maybe you're not producing a lot of your own work. But I do think the floodgates kind of open again eventually, and you can only force it so much
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:24

@MerelyHuman 🤯

It's kind of breaking all the rules and all of the ways that we genuinely are taught to think and what we're taught to expect from an educational environment, which I think is why it's so powerful. And I know it was really uncomfortable for most of my students when I encouraged them to fail or be open to failure to own and embrace what they felt like might be failures and to learn from them
@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:35

@topgold 👏

Top gold. I wish that I had an alarm every morning that went off. That was just saying, just you saying, respect your zone, respect your zone over and over again so that I couldn't get entangled in anything else before I respected my zone that morning. Thank you so much for sharing that I'm definitely going to be using that as a kind of mantra over the coming weeks as I try to finish this new first draft material
@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:57

@Shawn_Christy Teaching!

And it's interesting because obviously differentiating between that and what that feels like is tricky. And I know I often started out by trying imitate some of my favorite writers, but anyways, I'm curious if you had any sort of experience like that, and if you are still teaching or like to teach at all
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@Shawn_Christy
Shawn Schepps
@Shawn_Christy · 1:18
Hey, I am still teaching. I'm teaching a creative writing class online, and I really love it. I love teaching. My students in the past have come to my table with a sense of urgency and confusion. So I take the confusion out of the formula by explaining structure and all that kind of stuff to them. And then they're not confused. And then they start writing and they're pumped because they're actually writing
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