We call them vomit drafts. Gross, I know, but if you ever saw one, you’d understand. Writers like to say the first draft is really just their way of telling themselves the story. A first draft should be spontaneous, hurried, and unpolished. There should be placeholder names streaked with minimal details and chunks of typos and a splattering of grammatical errors.

At home in my office, quarantined from my laptop.

It should be a mess nobody in their right mind wants to clean up.

But despite the obvious benefits of simply getting something down – and quick – I struggled. A single scene, just six to ten pages, would often take me five hours to draft. And that’s after spending months building an outline longer than most novellas.

For many, the first draft is the most magical part of the entire writing process. For me, it was a descent into the Pit of Despair.

I’d revise myself into melancholy and alt-tab my way to the pacifying distraction of social media. Did I say pacifying? In this decade? Forgive my foolishness, I was weak.

I blame part of my wheel spinning on the habits I amassed during my strategy guide career, when there was no time for revisions. First drafts would be copy-edited, sent into production, and printed by month’s end. You had to either get it right the first time or you didn’t work.

Last month I jokingly tweeted at the developers of Scrivener, the writing software I use. I requested a new feature called “First Draft Mode” that would disable your keyboard’s backspace, delete, and control keys, making it all but impossible to cut, copy, or revise yourself into a stall. I yearned to be forced into relentless forward progress.

“Oh, like with a pen and paper,” my wife said.

You see, I’d long ago cast aside the notion of ever writing by hand. For one, I could barely read my own penmanship. And writing for any prolonged duration aggravated my comes-and-goes carpal tunnel.

But I was desperate. And I had that lovely pen I bought in Japan last fall, which I’ve used nearly every day since. So I bought myself an oversized, hardback notepad, transcribed my scene notes onto a sticky, and sat down to write. Seventy minutes later, I had a finished scene. 1500 words. The next morning, I did it again. And ninety minutes later I had a draft of a 2200-word scene I know would have taken me nearly two days to draft.

I can only imagine this is what being freed from prison feels like.

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