ENOUGH WITH THE TRASH TALK!
The other day one of my Facebook friends who makes his living as a screenwriter-slash-writing professor posted some advice he’d received years ago from one of his own instructors: A crappy first draft is worth more than a nonexisting one. He followed the post with this endorsement: Words to live by.
As an author and writing teacher myself, I read this counsel and had two reactions. First, is nonexisting a word? (Isn’t the proper term nonexistent?) Second, here we go again with the trash talking.
I certainly agree that any start is better than a blank page. But why do so many writing authorities insist on name calling when it comes to first drafts? Take Ernest Hemingway, who warned his many disciples, “The first draft of anything is s**t.” And then there is the contemporary writing master Anne Lamott. In her hugely popular book she devoted an entire chapter to “Sh**ty First Drafts.” As an inspirational force,
