The Bad First Draft
Write it fast and badly on purpose; its only job is to exist.
The difficulty is not that you write badly under pressure — it is that you stop writing at all. The inner editor arrives before anything exists on the page, reads the half-formed sentence, and rules against it. The bad first draft is a tactical maneuver against that reflex: you declare, in advance, that this version is permitted to be terrible. Permission changes everything. Sentences that would have been deleted before they finished forming get to land. Ideas that seemed too obvious or too strange make it through. The mess you produce is not the goal — the goal is that you now have material, and material can be worked.
This approach applies whenever you are blocked, starting cold, or circling the same paragraph without forward movement. It does not apply once you are revising: at that stage, judgment is the job, and suspending it will only undo work you have already earned. The move is also harder than it sounds for experienced writers, who have developed strong editorial instincts — and those instincts will try to fire. The practice is less about lowering your standards than about deferring them. You are not writing badly; you are writing bravely, knowing that the revision session exists precisely to fix what this session produces. The bad draft is not the failure. Refusing to write one often is.
In practice
Breaking an opening that won't start
She stood at the door and — no. She had always — that's not it either. The house was —
She stood at the door and didn't knock. The house looked the same, which made no sense. She hadn't expected it to look the same. She went in anyway. This whole opening is wrong and that's fine.
The writer stops correcting mid-sentence and lets the draft move forward, even flagging aloud that it isn't working — momentum is the win, not quality.
Unsticking a scene you've been avoiding
Marcus tells her about the money here. [Too important to get wrong. Come back later.]
Marcus tells her about the money. He says it badly. She reacts too much, probably. The dialogue is flat — FIX — but he tells her, and she doesn't leave, and somehow that matters, and now the scene is done in some form.
The bracketed avoidance kept the scene empty; the bad version, with its own notes embedded, is now something a revision can actually improve.
Finishing an essay that stalls at the argument
The argument here is complicated and I'm not sure I've earned it yet, so I'll leave space for it: [argument goes here].
So the argument is basically that silence is a choice and most of us pretend it isn't. This is probably too blunt. Doesn't matter. Moving on.
Writing the blunt, embarrassing version of the argument reveals what the argument actually is — something no amount of bracketed space would have produced.
Common questions
- What is a bad first draft and why do writers recommend it?
- A bad first draft is a deliberately low-stakes version you write fast, without self-editing, whose only purpose is to exist on the page. Writers recommend it because drafting and judging compete for the same mental space — when you let the critic in early, you stop producing material that can be revised later.
- Does the bad first draft mean you have to throw everything away and start over?
- No — most writers find more usable material in a bad draft than they expected. The bad draft tends to contain the real direction of the piece, just buried in rough language and wrong turns that revision can clear away.
- How do I actually turn off my inner editor while drafting?
- Most writers use a concrete constraint: a timer, a word-count sprint, or a rule that the cursor only moves forward. Some write in a plain text editor with the font set to white so they cannot reread as they go. The technique that works is the one that removes the physical opportunity to stop and judge.
- Is the bad first draft the same as freewriting?
- They overlap but are not identical. Freewriting is a warm-up or discovery exercise with no expected output; the bad first draft is a real attempt at a real piece, written fast with low standards. The bad first draft ends with a draft — rough, but shaped around an actual project.
Inside Verbaria
In Verbaria, the Coach can open a timed drafting session that locks suggestions and flags until the timer ends — so you can move through a bad first draft without the editor interrupting before anything exists to edit.
Where it comes from: Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (1994) — her chapter title for it is famously less polite.
This is one of the tools inside Verbaria — the writing room that names the craft while you work. Read the writing.