It’s an absolute truth that first drafts in general suck, whether we’re talking about the first draft of a single line or the first draft of an entire novel. First stabs are rarely polished and sensible, and are frequently so awful as to be the basis of scientific proof that you cannot and should not write.
The Electric Church was my second published novel, and both my third and 17th completed novel (the first draft was my third novel, but the version eventually published 14 years later had a lot of water under the bridge and so was really a wholly separate novel). And believe me, all that work was necessary—and I’m saying that as a guy who generally likes his first drafts. The fact is, first attempts are often terrible, because you’re feeling your way through the darkness—you don’t yet know what’s going to work. There’s a lot of daylight between theory and practice—in your head, some literary technique or trick might work, but when you try to put it to paper it all falls apart.
This can be a low point for a writer. You have a great idea, you start to work on it, and then you realize it’s not working. It might, in fact, be terrible. The real trick here is to be okay with that. The trick is to embrace the suck.
The Only Way Out is Forward
The hardest thing to do is realize that your work isn’t great but keep going. Embracing the suck isn’t just about understanding that early efforts are often ragged and imperfect. The real secret is to resist the urge to toss everything you’ve done and start over, because that’s the recipe for never finishing a project. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to toss everything into a garbage can and set it on fire when you realize your work sucks, but the legit secret to making progress is to resist that urge.
The trick is, revise, don’t restart. If you’re someone who gets frustrated the moment your prose isn’t 100% pure gold, if you get stuck re-writing the first sentence a thousand times, if you abandon projects at the halfway point because they’re not what you imagined initially you’re going to struggle to finish anything, because the way you get that prose as close to perfect as possible is to finish a draft, then go back to the beginning and polish. And then repeat.
Full disclosure: As noted above, I’m not much of a reviser. I tend to like my drafts—but I do revise. My revision efforts tend to be pretty focused; while I like 75% of my draft, the 25% I don’t love is usually threaded throughout the whole thing, and I address it. If I have a section in the middle of a chapter that is obviously not working, I don’t just toss the whole chapter or novel out—I struggle through it and leave it behind. Then I go back and work on it.
Of course, some writers do restart every time they drift from the mark, and they also produce plenty of publishable material. That last part is the key—are you finishing stuff? Do you have polished, publication-ready material at the end of the day? If yes, you can ignore this. You do you. If no—ask yourself if you need to lower the bar for a first pass.
I apply this to liquor as well, of course. Sometimes you order a dank beer that is absolutely awful, and some people give up and order something else. I push through. In other words, I am the hero in this situation.