Don't settle for the rough draft

Those of you who are into Myers-Briggs probably know your type and how it impacts the way you work and what you’re interested in doing. I’m an ENTP. The E may surprise some people who know me personally—I’m more of an ambivert, which Myers-Briggs doesn’t have as a possible category, so I’m barely on the extrovert side of things—but the rest of it makes a whole lotta sense. And one thing about ENTPs is that we’d much rather start an enterprise and feel all that new-project energy than actually finish it, no matter how cool that thing is.

This is why I have a dozen or so rough drafts of short stories on my laptop. Most of them I’ve run by my writers’ group and then gotten caught up in a different story, or I’ve gone back to working on my novel, or there was a cool new show on Netflix that I had to check out. And I have at least a hundred story ideas in a document that I’ve uncreatively but aptly titled “Story Ideas.”

In other words, when it comes to the writing that I do for myself, my creative process is less like a dolphin nurturing her one calf and more like a loggerhead turtle abandoning a ton of eggs and hoping some of them live.

And some of them do. When I choose a long-term project, it has to be something that grabs my attention, that I know I’ll care about for longer than a week. And once I commit to that project, I’m in it for the long haul—which includes however many revisions, of whatever depth, that it takes to get the story looking the way I want it to.

If you’re a seasoned writer, you know the importance and value of revision. You know that taking time on a project before showing it to anyone outside your inner circle will pay off in terms of quality and readership. But if you’re new to writing, you may not have tried revising—and it can be daunting at first.

I started writing when I was young—like, four-years-old young. People were impressed; parents, relatives, friends, and teachers were amazed at the amount of time I spent working on stories. My writing consistently earned A’s with little effort since I was always going above and beyond. When the other kids had to revise their work, mine was already deemed good enough. That made much younger me very happy.

But it shortchanged my ability to learn the entire writing process. And when I got to college and had to actually revise my work (which was sometimes “good enough” but always had to be better), I had to consciously reason through what I was doing. It didn’t come naturally. In the past, that would have frustrated me to no end. But I knew that because it wasn’t easy, my hard-won knowledge would be at the forefront of my mind whenever I needed it. Unlike things that are more intuitive, it was a skill I could tell others about and even demonstrate.

So if you have a rough draft that you know isn’t the pinnacle of your vision for your project, don’t throw it away, start over from scratch, or talk yourself out of seeing its flaws. Come back next week for some tips for revision that will help you transform that first draft into something much closer to what you want your work to look like.