Write the Ugly First Draft Already

You have a card with your point. You have notes, a source log, a lede and an outline. You are, by any reasonable standard, ready to write.

So naturally you are going to clean the refrigerator.

Then you'll check your email. Then you'll research the history of the water meter for 45 minutes, which is "research," technically. Then you'll reorganize your desktop icons by color. Then it'll be dinner time, and well, you can't start writing now, it's dinner time.

Marge has watched writers do this for decades. She once watched a reporter alphabetize the office spice rack to avoid a 500-word story about a stop sign. There was no office spice rack. He brought it from home.

Why you're stalling

You stall because part of you believes the first draft has to be good. A first draft only has to exist.

Dale the raccoon wants everything perfect, right away, on the first try. Dale also eats out of dumpsters. Dale's standards are inconsistent. Every sentence you type, Dale is there, rummaging, holding it up to the light, sniffing it, hissing. You'll write half a sentence, delete it, write it again, delete it, and 20 minutes later you have a lede and a headache.

Here's the deal you make with Dale: he gets his turn. Lesson 8 is entirely his. He can tear the draft apart then. But right now he has to go sit in the garage.

Set it up so you can't escape

Practical things that work for real people:

• Close everything. Browser tabs, email, phone in another room. If you need a fact you don't have, you'll use a placeholder (more on that in a minute), so you don't need the internet.
• Set a timer. 25 minutes is a common choice. Tell yourself you only have to write until it goes off. Usually you'll keep going. If you don't, take a five minute break and do another round.
• Open your outline next to the draft. You're not writing an article. You're filling in ten lines, one at a time. Ten small tasks. Anyone can do one small task.
• Paste your lede first. You already wrote it in lesson 4. It's done. Paste it in and start on line 2 of the outline. The blank page is no longer blank. Ha. Take that, blank page.

Draft fast, draft ugly

Go line by line through your outline. For each line, write one to three paragraphs. Don't polish. Don't reread. Keep moving forward.

Bad sentences are allowed. Repeated words are allowed. Clumsy transitions are allowed. A sentence that just says "[SOMETHING HERE ABOUT HOW THE PIPES ARE OLD, MAKE IT GOOD]" is allowed.

Is that pretty? No. It's got the elegance of a shopping cart with one bad wheel. But look at it: the structure is there, the facts are there, the best quote is there, and every gap is labeled. That's a successful first draft. Marge would put a gold star on it. She'd also put 30 red marks on it. Both things can be true.

Placeholders: the secret weapon

The single biggest drafting trap is stopping to look something up. You need the year the pipes went in, so you open a browser, and 50 minutes later you know a great deal about the history of cast iron and you've written nothing.

Use placeholders instead. Square brackets, all caps, a word you'll search for later:

• [CHECK: year] for a fact you need to confirm
• [QUOTE: Banks, 1:14:20] for a quote you'll pull from the recording
• [NUMBER?] for a figure you're not sure of
• [CUT?] for a paragraph you suspect doesn't belong

When the draft is done, search for "[" and handle every one. Do not publish with brackets in the text. It has happened. To professionals. In large newspapers. Marge once saw "[INSERT SNAPPY ENDING]" in print, and she says she still hears it at night.

Opinion writers: draft the argument and save the zingers

If you're writing opinion, the ugly draft is where you find out whether your argument actually holds up. Follow the opinion outline from lesson 5. Write the evidence paragraphs as plainly as you can, even flatly. Write the strongest counterargument fairly, in a paragraph by itself. If you can't write a fair version of the other side, you don't understand the issue well enough yet, and better to learn that now than in the comments section.

Don't spend the draft on clever lines. You'll be tempted to write the perfect zinger. Write "[ZINGER]" and move on. The zinger will come to you in the shower tomorrow. They always do. Nobody knows why showers are like this.

Finish. Then walk away.

Write until you hit the end of your outline. Write a kicker, even a bad one. Then stop.

Check the word count. If you're between 600 and 1,400, you're fine. Long is normal. Cutting is easier than adding, and lesson 8 is a festival of cutting. If you're under 500, look at your outline: you probably skipped a slot, likely the other side or the what-happens-next paragraph.

Now leave it alone. A few hours at least. Overnight is better. You can't edit what you just wrote, because your brain still remembers what you meant and reads that instead of what's on the page. Tomorrow you'll see it fresh. Tomorrow, Dale gets out of the garage. He's been in there all night. He's not happy. He found the birdseed.