How To Write a First Draft

How To Write a First Draft

by Katherine Lawless

Step 1: Buy a moleskin journal. 

Moleskin journals are great because everyone that sees you writing in one will think you're writing something important, even if it's hot garbage. 

Step 2: Have a great idea. Good ideas will also work. But bad ideas will not. 

Step 3: Begin writing. 

Step 4: Quickly realize you hate your story and you hate how it's being written and its bad and not good and then stop writing for months. 

Step 5: Take a creative writing class where you are forced to write. Pick back up your moleskin journal. Then, write in short bursts cause you're too lazy and dumb to just sit down and do it.

Step 6: Get your thoughts in order. Write all the plot points you know in a basic outline.

 Do this less because you need it and more because you're procrastinating actually writing. 

(it's extra helpful to do this step in pencil, so none of the words show up in your blog post later)

Step 7: Use a typewriter to type up your draft. 

YOU CANT USE ANYTHING ELSE. 

The typewriter should be very loud and shake the walls of your apartment and probably annoy your roommate. If you don't have one then you aren't pretentious enough to be a writer so you should give up now.

Step 8: Read your draft for the first time. Realize that nothing in it makes sense and it's very bad and also not good and you need to change everything about it. 

Step 9: Mark it up.

Step 10: Write your new draft on the other side of the original pages. Do this all in pen so you can't go back and erase anything.

 Carry around the draft in your backpack so you can write in short bursts. 

Step 11: Go talk to your professor. Get his advice. Hope it's good advice and force yourself to finish the draft. 

Step 12: Get out your computer to type up the second draft once you realize you have to send it to your professor. 

Step 13: Get bored of that immediately. Instead, start making a blogger.com/blog/post for dart blub. 

Step 14: Look over all your work. 

Stare at it. 

Contemplate it. 

Is it good?

Probably not. 

Step 15: Get sooooooo sleepy and tired. It's midnight now and you have to go to bed.

Step 16: Move all the garbage and books and papers that you shoved on your bed back to your desk.

You're done taking pictures! You no longer have to worry about your room looking clean. 

Step 17: Get ready for bed and settle in with a good book! 

(maybe, perhaps, perchance, you'll read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien or Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Addams or Frankenstein by Mary Shelly or How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison but you really don't have to, those are just suggestions)