KC Davis on writing shitty first drafts and getting it wrong
Your series of interviews (with KC and Erin) is really helping shift my paradigm in a healthy direction. I never thought that my writing, which feels like such a solitary, uncharted endeavor, could be in active partnership with others. I never thought of an editor as someone who could be with me in the most solitary spaces. And now that you’ve framed it that way (and sorry, i know I may be mis-paraphrasing in a way that suits me) I feel like that’s exactly what I need.
I feel like my major struggle with a “shitty first draft” is that writing—just saying what I have to say—is so damn scary. A lot of times I struggle to connect with how people talk about shitty first drafts, because it often comes down to “just start writing, and keep writing.” But I feel like I have to dig so deep to find language for the thing, that my pace for a first draft is generally 3 or 4 sentences an hour. If I try to speed it up, I can write a whole draft and not actually have said the thing. Like it’s not even a first draft. It’s just words.
But the idea of someone accompanying me in finding that language sounds so lovely—both for the outcome of the process, and to soothe the terror ramped up in my nervous system every time I write.
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