First Draft Quotes

“Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The first draft is black and white. Editing gives the story color.”
― Emma Hill

“Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is—sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes.”
― john gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.”
― Angeline Trevena

“Now let's say you've finished your first draft. Congratulations! Good job! Have a glass of champagne, send out for pizza, do whatever it is you do when you've got something to celebrate. If you have someone who has been impatiently waiting to read your novel-a spouse, let's say, someone who has perhaps been working nine to five and helping to pay the bills while you chase your dream-then this is the time to give up the goods...if, that is, your first reader or readers will promise not to talk to you about the book until you are ready to talk to them about it.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Never get too attached to the first draft of anything – this includes writing, art, homes, love. You will revise and revise and revise. We are always in the midst of our own becoming.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“One
cannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the story
is worthwhile because until one has finished writing the story
one does not know for sure what the idea is; and one cannot
judge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, because
in a first draft the style of the finished story does not yet exist.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat—chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.”
― Don Roff

“Your first draft is not a gold nugget. It might be a nugget, but it's not golden.”
― Ethan Nahté

“First draft blues:
"He tested the stick and glanced at the set handbrake. With his feet he felt the accelerator, the brake, the clutch. Backwards, but otherwise just the same, and comforting in a solid, mechanical way. It even smelled right, oil, petrol, lubricated warm metal, and the polished windshield seemed transparent in the night’s silver flood.”
― J. Gunnar Grey, Deal With the Devil, Part One

“I begin. I write a draft without ever looking back. Without ever touching what's gone before. Because I think it will be shit, so I daren't look back. I write a draft. I start again. I have the text when I start the second draft and then I do the same thing a third time.
- To Linda L. Richards, The January Interview”
― Clive Barker

“Good things come out of first drafts sometimes.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts

“That's the word for him. "Unbelievable." If you'd known Mortimer like I did, you'd understand. He sees reality as... well, as a first draft. Plenty of space to edit the truth the way he likes it.”
― Mallory Arnold, How to Survive a Horror Story

“Let the dreamer write the first draft. Let the perfectionist do the rest.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“Today I finished the first draft of my next book.
When I wrote the first draft of my first book, I thought I had won something great — perhaps not the whole war, but at least the first battle. Only later did I understand that the first draft is not the ending of anything. It is the beginning of everything.
You write more books, you realize the first draft is not the end of the war. It is the declaration of it.
A first draft doesn’t have to be good or bad. It only needs to exist. It is unpolished but breathing. It is like describing a dream before it fades. A first draft can be messy, uncertain, rough, yet filled with traces of possibilities.
When you finish the first draft of a work, something changes. You no longer feel trapped in the endless work ahead. You actually begin to imagine how beautiful it will be to return to edit, to add the details that are missing.
The thought of reshaping gives you a rush. The tiredness disappears. You must let the First draft exist, and by letting it exist, you are allowing yourself the possibility of creating a masterpiece.”
― Shon Mehta