Five Years of Shitty First Drafts - Some Thoughts on Writing after Half a Decade of Blogging

The official fifth anniversary of Life-Sparring.com will be in a few weeks. On October 22, 2015, I pressed the publish button for the very first Life-Sparring round. The work on the blog started earlier, though. I registered the domain in August 2015 and started writing shortly after that. So, I am already passed my first half a decade as an ambitious and (somewhat) consistent writer/blogger.

If I summarized my writing experience so far with just three words, I would have to borrow from author Anne Lamott and pick “Shitty First Drafts” as my mantra.

Just like for many other people trying their hand at writing, Lamott’s book Bird by Bird has been of immense value, especially the chapter on “Shitty First Drafts.” Just reading that most professional writers struggle es much as I do to get started with an article was very assuring. And Anne Lamott is right. Pouring out unfiltered ideas without overthinking them is the best way to get started with any writing project.

Most of my ideas that started as an incredibly shitty first draft eventually turned into a piece somewhat worthy of publishing. If I counted right, this is the 74th full-length article I published on Life-Sparring (not counting the shorter Quick Jabs). In the same time frame, I accumulated exactly 26 “zombie drafts” that never left the (shitty) draft status. A 74% success rate is pretty darn solid.

Practice Makes (Kindof) Perfect

Now, even with five years of practice, some people would say, and one person even did say so quite recently, that I am still not a great writer and that maybe not just my first drafts are shitty.

I, for my part, think that I have been at least improving. Or, I might have just gotten used to putting myself out there in written form. These days, I occasionally feel quite pleased with an article, while during the first year or two, I cringed every time I published a new piece.

Achieving mastery in writing might take me at least another five years, but when it comes to shitty first drafts, I feel that I am up there with the greats already.

Now, writing shitty first drafts might sound easy to you, but it took me quite some time to let go. Especially at the beginning of my blogging efforts, I often was staring at a blank screen, overthinking an idea, expecting perfectly refined sentences to form magically.

Much easier and far more productive is to start by letting my thoughts run wild, and my hands flow freely over the keyboard, recording pretty much an unfiltered brain dump. With this messy idea-collection, I get down to work, just like a sculptor, taking away what does not belong and adding what is missing.

This process takes usual several multi-hour sessions, and often, the final article takes a significant turn from the (shitty) first draft. Putting thoughts on paper, even in a very rough form, gives them a chance to start breathing, forming roots, and growing into different directions. Whatever you want to write, just start with a shitty first draft. This is the single best advice that I have picked up as a writer and is also the best advice I can give you.

Fighting Gremlins

I mastered shitty first drafts, and I became better getting from the first sketch to a reasonably comprehensible article. That leaves me with the most significant challenge: ironing out all typos, grammatically errors, and the occasional false friend (when I am translating German thoughts into English too literally).

Honestly, I am not sure if I will ever reach a level where I can avoid all gremlins in my writing.

For the first few articles back in 2015, I used the outsourcing platform Fiverr to have my drafts checked by native English-speaking editors. You can read about my experience in “Not my Core Competency” or head over to Fiverr via an affiliate link to try it out by yourself.

The editors from Fiverr were cheap, but the best among them often raised their prices or had long customer queues. I often was forced to switch my proofreaders unless I was willing to wait several days or to pay a premium. While some editors sent back extremely detailed corrections, to the extent that it felt as if my article lost a bit of its identity, others barely ran spellcheck and missed errors that I found on my final reading. There was just no consistency with outsourcing the editorial help.

Also, there was the aspect of costs. While US$ 5-15 is a fair price for a detailed edit on a 2,000 words article, even today, Life-Sparring.com is sparsely monetized (you can buy t-shirts and other merch on Spreadshirt.com, and occasionally I post affiliate links, always marked as such). I am happy to spend some money on my blogging hobby, but there are (financial) limits.

Since 2016 I go rogue and check my drafts only with the cloud-based app Grammarly. For Grammarly, I pay US$ 139.95 for an annual premium subscription.

Of course, using Grammarly cannot be compared to a professional editor. But receiving instant feedback and suggestions while staying true to my own choice of words and being somewhat forced to improve are strong arguments.

Grammarly also keeps nicely track of my writing output, benchmarks me against other users, and lets me know the nature of my frequent mistakes. Technically I could use that feedback to work on my grammatical and orthographic weaknesses. Maybe I will even do so one day.