In Praise of Shitty First Drafts & Talking To Yourself

Here’s the secret: nobody is ever going to see or read your shitty first drafts. So have fun with them!

Image by Temel from Pixabay

My old buddy Neale Donald Walsh had the good fortune of God — or his unconscious, or something Edgar Cayce could tell us about — take control of his writing, pouring the words out using a 19th century technique known as “automatic writing” (where you put a pad out of sight and simply let your hand start writing, and stuff comes out). His NY Times bestselling “Conversations With God” series was the result.

Most of us, though, don’t have God dictating through us. As a result, more often than not we end up writing what author Annie Lamott, in her brilliant book Bird By Bird on how to write, calls “shitty first drafts.”

I’ve written thousands of them, as have most successful writers. Arthur C. Clarke, the guy who’s novel was made into the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey, is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying, “Your first million words are practice.” In my case, that was certainly true.

Yet so many aspiring writers unnecessarily struggle and make themselves miserable as they try to produce brilliant prose with their first drafts. Few of us can ever pull that off. Instead, as Lamott says, shitty first drafts are the foundation for better second drafts and ultimately excellent final manuscripts.

There’s this mythical thing called “writer’s block.” As a person afflicted with my own substantial share of OCD, I’m pretty sure that most people with writer’s block are experiencing something very similar to what I used to: thinking that “this draft just isn’t good enough” and then tearing it up or deleting it and starting all over again.

Here’s the secret: nobody is ever going to see or read your shitty first drafts. So have fun with them!

At least once a week, I find myself sitting down to the computer facing a blank screen — with no idea what I’m going to write — and typing something to myself like:

“Well, what are we going to write about today? How about a piece on shitty first drafts? But how should I start it out? Should I begin with a story? Or talk about how people are terrified of judgment and thus often don’t even start writing? Or…”

Pretty soon I’m in the actual process of writing the article.

When writing something larger, I also often talk to myself on the screen to try to get a handle on the concepts I’m going to try to convey.

Back in the 1970s, my first writing mentor was a man named Joe Sugarman, who taught a seminar in New York that I attended; the topic was writing advertising copy. But Joe went way beyond simply how to write good ad copy. He had a great solution to “writer’s block” as well.

Joe’s suggestion was to put a piece of paper into the typewriter (this was 1973) and just start talking to yourself. Ask yourself questions and then answer them. “You’ll be amazed what your unconscious mind will channel through your fingers,” he promised us. He was right.

A few years back, I was stuck for a topic to write a new book about after being solicited by a big New York publishing house for my “next book.” What’s below is my conversation with myself that I just found in an old archive; it led to my writing my book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture. It’s a great example of how Joe’s technique works, and I think you’ll find some good food for thought in some of my ramblings.

Keep in mind, though, this was my process preceding writing an outline for my book Threshold. I never expected anybody to read it (and have cleaned it up a bit for this publication), but hopefully it’ll give you a sense for how a “stream of consciousness Q&A” self-administered strategy can help clarify exactly what you want to write about:

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A Curious Dialogue

Life is pretty good here in America. How come the Third World can’t use economic progress to achieve our lifestyle? Why don’t we encourage them to grow their way out of their problems?

Because it would take all of the resources of at least four planet Earths to sustain the eight billion people of our world if everybody were to live a lifestyle even of an American earning minimum wage flipping burgers. It’s simply not possible.

Then why do we have it so well?

Because others live so poorly. Literally. Look at the six-dollar nightlight you can buy in Wal-Mart, made in China. It took two hundred pounds of soil mined from the earth to supply the iron and copper in there. The plastic represents a pint of oil, and the manufacture of the plastic took four gallons of oil. The neon gas inside the little bulb had to be extracted from over a thousand cubic feet of air, and the process consumed another gallon of gasoline. When you add all the components together, there’s over two man-hours of work in it, and it had to be transported over 11,000 miles to get to the store where you bought it. And the store made a profit on the sale.

How is that possible?

The rulers of China are willing to use up their resources to get our cash, and to force their people to work as slaves. North Americans are 4% of the world’s population, but we consume 30% of the world’s natural resources and produce 50% of the world’s non-organic waste. We can pull it off because through luck, happenstance, and military power we directly or indirectly control most of the world’s oil. Our control of oil and military/economic power has caused the despots of the Third World to trade their resources and the sweat of their people for our currency.

And when the world runs out of oil?

It’s already happening in some countries. Burma is down to a 3-year supply, and the realization of that about three decades ago led to an overthrow of their government. As countries in the Third World lose access to oil or their wells begin to run dry, you find war follows. East Timor is oil-rich, for example, a fact overlooked in most American news analyses of why Indonesia invaded that tiny country. When countries run out of oil, they do what Hitler did when he ran low on oil: they go to war.

But it seems to me that we’re moving toward something positive, that we’re growing and evolving. I mean, a few hundred years ago they were burning women at the stake and a few hundred years before that they were murdering people in the crusades and before that people lived in caves and chased animals with sticks. So there has to be some sort of forward path, doesn’t there? Some kind of evolution?

Yes and no. Every modern culture and every organized religion that I know of has a myth that’s central to their belief structure, a creation myth, which starts out with people being in a state of grace or happiness, a Garden of Eden, from which they’re ejected into this world...

Don’t you think that’s a reference to the birth experience? To being thrown from the world of spirit into the world of matter?

Perhaps. But I suspect it’s really far more practical, more reality-grounded, because these stories almost always point to a real, physical place, not a metaphysical place. The Garden of Eden, for example, was at the headwater of four waterways, which became known as the Euphrates, Pison, Gion, and Hiddekel rivers. The name Eden is probably an adaptation from the Sumerian name for the plain of Mesopotamia, which was called Edinn. This was a real place, and the first writers of the Bible spoke as if they had specific knowledge of it. You’ll find this same sort of reality-groundedness in most other modern culture stories that refer to a previous golden age or to the decline of humanity, from the writings of Greek Poet Hesiod, who wrote Work and Days 2800 years ago, to the stories of traditional Norwegians, dating back to before the Christian conquest of Norway about 800 years ago. The Romans believed that when Saturn reigned in ancient times, there was neither sorrow nor work: everybody was happy and lived in peace. That was followed, according to the Romans, by the age of heroes — called the silver and bronze ages — and the iron age of work, which is pretty much where Roman history ended, when the Holy Roman Empire reinvented itself as the Holy Catholic Empire. So there’s a pretty strong consensus among our modern cultures, from the Jewish to the Christian to the Hindu to the Moslem, that there was a time in ancient history when all people lived happily and peacefully.

You missed the Buddhists.

Yes, intentionally. To the best of my knowledge, they have no story about the creation and there’s no notion of a fall from grace, at least that’s acknowledged among all the different Buddhist sects. But Buddhism doesn’t believe in a continuous soul and doesn’t discuss the presence or absence of a single creator, either. So Buddhism is a bit of an anomaly here. Nonetheless, the Buddhists start out with the assumption that all life is suffering, which was the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, and that through the practice of their method suffering can be overcome. One could argue that this presumes there was a time before our civilization came along when all life wasn’t suffering — which puts them back in the camp of the others — or that, like with the issue of monotheism, they just don’t go there. But I think the true answer is that while Hinduism believes in cyclical time, and Christianity, Judaism, and Islam believe in linear time, the Buddhists believe in chaotic time.

Chaotic time?

Chaotic time is the notion that there isn’t any particular time at all. It’s all just an eternal “now.” The now of the past is the same as the now of the present. If somebody became enlightened in the past, then people can also become enlightened in the present, because time is essentially directionless and chaotic.

They don’t posit an end of time?

Actually, the Buddhists do: you find reference to it in the Bodhisattva and other vows. For example, at his home in India, the Dalai Lama once led a group of us in a vow which included: “As long as space remains, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world.” It implies that there is some end time toward which we’re all moving, and those who take the vow to stay or reincarnate (using that word loosely, in the Buddhist sense) are going to stick around until that time. But in the acting out of Buddhism, I’d say you see more of the chaotic sense of time than the linear sense of time.

Ok, back then to being ejected from the Garden of Eden. What does that have to do with the evolution of human beings?

It has everything to do with it, or, rather, with refuting it. With this creation story and its variations, what virtually all Western and Eastern thought is saying is that there was a time in the past when we were happier and more attuned to spirit and Earth than we are today. In other words, in our striving for improvement, we’re not evolving, but instead we’re trying to go back to something we once had.

I know of one religion that doesn’t have a “we were once all happy” story in its timeline.

And that is?

Science. Our scientific story is that we started out living in caves, living painful and terrible lives in the freezing cold and rain, and eventually, through the use of ever-improving technology from fire to transistors, reached our current state of comfort. And, of course, if we would just turn everything over to science, they’d genetically engineer the perfect food, the perfect person, and the perfect world.

Yes, salvation through technology. However, you misrepresent that when you say it’s the scientific perspective. What you’ve described is the consumerist perspective, which falsely claims itself to be scientific. Consumerism is actually the largest religion in the world, and it carries the belief system you just described. But we’ll get back to that in a later conversation: first, I want to finish with the idea of the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden.

Wait a minute — you’re saying that science doesn’t say that we evolved from apes and that our ancestors were less happy than we are?

Science says no such thing. The science of biology suggests that we evolved from an early primate, which also evolved into apes: modern-day chimps and apes are our cousins, not our grandparents. And the science of paleoanthropology — the study of human and pre-human life before the invention of literacy — has pretty much totally refuted the notion that most early humans lived miserable lives. Like tribal people today, they ran the spectrum, from eking out a living to having abundant, comfortable lives.

Are you going to pitch the “noble savage” now?

It’s neither black nor white. A few weeks ago on a cold November day here in Vermont with about a foot of snow on the ground, Louise met a fellow in downtown Montpelier who was walking around barefoot. He had calluses on the bottoms of his feet that were at least a quarter-inch thick: he hadn’t worn shoes in years. And he walked that way everywhere he went, in all four seasons. The body is capable of acclimating itself to just about any type of weather, within reason.

I haven’t seen any nudist Eskimos.

They prefer to be called the Inuit people, but, yes, you’re right. On the other hand, even in the face of all the wonders and luxury of our lifestyle, many of them would prefer to continue to live their traditional life. Why would that be, even in the frozen north?

I dunno — it seems nuts to me. Freezing their butts off.

Not at all. They’re no colder or warmer than people living in town: both live in heated buildings and wear warm clothing. The big difference is that the people in town work anywhere from six to ten hours a day, five to seven days a week, just to survive. The Inuits who live their traditional lifestyle work about two hours a day to provide for food, heat, and shelter.

What about when they go out on a whale or seal hunt for a week at a time?

And they bring back several months worth of food? Do the math: it averages out to around two hours of “work” a day. That’s what’s typical among hunter/gathering people, whether it’s in the Arctic or on the Equator. Scientists — real scientists, not writers like Thomas Hobbs who’s always quoted with his “short, nasty and brutish” comment about pre-British life — often refer to such people as having “the original leisure lifestyle.” Missionaries today often make the same comment about such people as the Pilgrims did about some of the Native American tribes: they seem “lazy.” But it’s not that they’re lazy, it’s that they’re satisfied. They’re living in Eden, and so they don’t jump at a chance to go to work in a mine or factory or on a farm.

But what about the cannibals of Borneo or the warlike indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori? They were constantly killing each other: that doesn’t sound like Eden to me. There’s even some evidence of cannibalism among the Anasazi people living in what’s now called Colorado, during the twelfth century, and the Aztecs were big into eating people. How could you say these folks were living a leisure lifestyle?

Excellent question — you’re revealing the basic flawed myth of our culture: that linear time is the only time there is. That myth teaches that time is a line, moving from some distant “bad” point to some future “good” point, or from an extremely distant good time to a long period of bad time to some extremely imminent future good time. For example, God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and cursed future generations to work six days a week with their “faces covered with sweat.” But then God prepared an escape hatch, promising one day to send to Earth a savior to free people from God’s own curse. The Christians believe that was Jesus, but he didn’t fully succeed in freeing people from the curse of having to work so hard and have a miserable life, so he has to return to the Earth again to “make all things new.” So the beginning of time was being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the long middle of time was from then until now, and the end of time is either death leading to heaven — the individual end of time — or else the final battle of Armageddon followed by a thousand-year reign of peace.

Ok, I get it about chaotic time, and linear time is pretty much a description of the way I was brought up thinking, but why is linear time a myth?

Because it’s simply not so. In order to have a notion of linear time, it’s necessary first to erect a barrier to the memory of time before now. Cultures create stories of the past which exclude all previous cycles, and focus instead only on the current cycle, from the beginning of that culture until the present, with theories of its future. For example, fundamentalists hold up our story of Adam and Eve as the story of the creation of human beings. But in Genesis we’re told that Adam and Even found a wife for their son, Seth, and that after killing Able, Cain went off to the land of Nod and found himself a wife there and gave birth to Enoch. You’ll find that most tribal people, when you ask them what they’re called, will give you the word in their language for “human being” or “people” or “man.” This is true of the San, the Lakota, the Inuit, the Ik, the Karamoja, and virtually every other tribe on Earth. They realize there are other humans around, but they consider their particular group to be unique from all the others. They were the ones who, like the Inca, were born of the sun. Or were the result of a heavenly bird laying an egg in the place where they live from which the first “people” were hatched. It’s a creation story, yes, but a story of the creation of one tribe, which came to be known as the Hebrews or the Jews.

And that story erects the barrier to remembering what life was like before their tribe got started?

Yes. It’s the beginning of linear time.

And all our modern religions observe either linear or chaotic time?

Mostly. You could argue that historically the Jews understood cyclical time — they had built into the epistemology the notion of a weekly day of rest, of giving the fields a rest every seven years, and of freeing all slaves and equalizing all income every 49 years. But while some Jews keep this cyclical notion of time alive, most have lost it: the Jubilee is no longer observed every 50 years, for example, and few fields are given their seven-year rest. Only a very small percentage of Jews even observe the Sabbath in the way that the Bible dictates, and virtually no Christians do so. The Christians were so offended by cyclical time that they smashed Maypoles in the 15th century and changed the springtime rituals of cyclical “pagan” time into celebrations of a past event called Easter. So pretty much everybody lives in linear time these days, but cyclical time is what’s true.

That’s a pretty strong statement. I think science supports linear time as being what’s true: consider the big bang theory.

And what follows that?

Well, eventually all matter turns dark and cold.

And then?

Eventually gravity pulls all matter back into the center of the universe, where it gets compressed into a pinpoint.

And then?

Got it. It explodes outward, in a big bang, starting the whole thing over again. The ultimate cyclical time.

Right. No matter how you look at it, if you look hard enough you find that everything goes in cycles instead of in a straight line.

Which brings us back to the notion of evolution. If everything goes in cycles, then how come there weren’t people back before there were dinosaurs?

Maybe there were. But it would have been in the last creation cycle of some other world, not in the last mammal-growing cycle of this planet. And the mathematical odds are vastly in favor of there having been, being, and will be what we call people on other planets in the universe. We’re part of the life-cycle of this planet, which is part of the life-cycle of this cycle of what we call our known universe.

Then evolution is a linear-time theory within a cyclical time universe?

Actually, not the way Darwin understood it. Some of his earliest writing was about the finches he found on the Galápagos archipelago. He noticed that there was a cycle occurring between two finch populations, those with larger beaks and those with smaller beaks. The birds with the smaller beaks were more efficient in their use of energy: they didn’t have to drag around as big a beak. This was an advantage, so long as there were small-sized seeds for them to feed on. But as they increased in population, they wiped out the plants that carried the small seeds, and their small beaks were not strong enough to crack the larger seeds of the large-seed plants that came to replace the small-seed plants. So the small-beaked finches seemed to vanish, while the population of large-beaked finches flourished. But after a few years, the large-beaked finches had wiped out the large-seed plants, and so their population went into a decline while the small-beaked finches reemerged to eat the small-seed plants, which were now growing where the large-seed plants had died out. What Darwin observed was a cycle, not a progression.

But there is a progression in evolution, isn’t there? I mean how else would we be here if life on Earth began with single-cell organisms?

Yes, of course. But within that progression are cycles. That’s the important point.

As it relates to humans and human evolution and that so-popular buzz-phrase these days, “The evolution of consciousness”?

Exactly. Imagine that you were living in a way that only required you to work two hours a day. The climate was decent, food abundant, and there weren’t a lot of people around to compete with you for the local food supply. You spent your days hanging out with family and friends, making up songs, telling stories, playing games, even visiting other psychic worlds and talking directly to the gods through the use of local plants or techniques of meditation and breathing. Life was good.

Sounds like Eden. But wouldn’t your tribe’s population eventually grow to the point where it wiped out the local resource base and you’d have to work more than two hours a day to find food?

Let’s say for the purpose of this discussion that that happened once in the past and that your tribe learned from it. You learned the importance of keeping your population small and stable, in order to maintain a high quality of life.

This was before birth control pills?

Yes, but there are many other means of birth control. Several plants make effective morning-after teas. Women, living as they do in the natural world, are more in tune with the natural rhythms of their bodies and easily able to spot the fertile days of their menstrual cycle. They discovered long ago that when women have equal power with men — particularly to decide when to have sex — that the population stabilized. Like the Lakota, they have a cultural belief that it’s poor form to have a child more than once every six or seven years, because then the previous child won’t get enough parental attention and the tribe will grow too fast. Non-procreative sex is encouraged, even including homosexuality. Women breastfeed their children for years, and while women are breastfeeding their bodies suppress estrogens and so it’s very hard for them to get pregnant. So, you’ve figured out a bunch of ways to keep your population stable, none of which include having to kill children or old people.

But there’s evidence that some tribal people did kill their children and old people.

Yes, but let’s assume, for the moment, that those people did that during the learning part of the cycle I referred to a moment ago. They overpopulated, didn’t know how to handle it, had to kill off some folks, and eventually discovered the methods I just mentioned.

How are we feeding ourselves in these societies?

We gather about eighty percent of our food from local plants, and about twenty percent of it is local game. The women trap small animals with nets, and the men hunt larger ones with spears and arrows and the like. It’s great fun, great sport, and also consider a sacred job. Food, after all, is the core of life.

Ok, so we’re living in a group, a tribe, working just a few hours a day, and our population is stable and life is good.

Right. Trading with the neighbors, occasionally our children will intermarry with theirs to keep the gene pool strong, we even have sporting competitions with them.

Is this true? Did this actually happen?

Lacrosse was a game invented by the Iroquois. They’d play it for fun, but most often they’d play it as a way of settling disputes between tribes.

I thought the Europeans invented sports.

Some. Until contact with the Native Americans, most European “sports” were miniaturized versions of war. Jousting, sword-fighting tournaments, battles to the death against wild animals like lions or bulls in an arena, or fistfights. There were a few that were less violent, like the game of golf which was invented by people who’d lived tribally — the Scots — until Britain conquered them. But because golf wasn’t a “preparation for war” exercise, in 1457 the Scottish Parliament passed a law making it illegal to play. They wanted people to practice their archery, instead, to help defend and expand the British Empire.

Geez. Ok, continue.

So we’re sitting around having a pretty good life, and one day a tribe just north of us decides they’re going to start organized and intensive agriculture. We visit them and remind them that every time a tribe has tried that in the past, it’s caused their population to explode and ultimately led to famine, but they decide they know better than we do and tell us to mind our own business.

Why would they do that? You mean they discovered agriculture?

No, intensive agriculture had been known for twenty thousand or more years. Probably for all of human history, a hundred thousand or more years, but we have fossil evidence of it at least thirty to forty thousand years ago. It’s just that people generally didn’t do it.

What do you mean by “intensive agriculture,” as opposed to regular agriculture?

Well, all people historically have practiced a sort of local, natural agriculture. Even some apes do it. They encourage the local growth of plants that are good to eat, and weed out the plants that aren’t good to eat. But intensive agriculture is where large areas of land are devoted to the production of a single crop. This causes a boom in the food supply, and so therefore the population grows. The story of Cain and Abel in the Bible is a warning against it: God hated Cain’s farmed goods and preferred Abel’s offerings from his herding and hunting life. It’s why Cain killed Abel.

What about all those prehistoric birth-control measures you talked about a minute ago?

Those were to keep the population stable within the limits of the local food supply. When the local food supply expands, they’re not necessary. The goal wasn’t a certain number of people in a particularly area, but a sustainable number of people in a particular ecosystem.

Ok, so the folks to the north of us have started planting wheat or sweet potatoes or whatever, and their population is growing. What happens next?

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The dialogue goes on for another five thousand words or thereabouts, and I won’t bore you with the rest of it, but you get the idea. It wanders all over the place, until I finally get to the nub of what I’m writing.

In addition, I’ve written here at Wisdom School before about the strategy (that I also learned from Joe Sugarman) of writing a letter to a friend or relative, which also works for me when I’m already certain of the beginning, middle, and end of what I’m going to say/write.

But when I’m uncertain, this “talking to myself” strategy has led me to write some really interesting (to me, anyway) books and articles. And don’t worry about doing anything that is clean or polished when you’re starting out; shitty first drafts are a very common beginning for even the most professional of writers.

Try it the next time you’re stuck. I guarantee you’ll be amazed by what happens!