Sarah sent me this quote, which comes from an essay on writing by John Dufresne.

All first drafts are experimental, chaotic, messy, and all take time, energy, patience and persistence. You won’t get it right the first time, and that’s as it should be. The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

That same essay describes my own shortcomings perfectly.

[The inexperienced novelist] can articulate theme, explain how he’ll go about revealing character, lay in symbols, build tension. But he never gets the story written, though he feels an urgency to do so. Often it is this very urgency that aborts the narrative. He wants to dodge the drafting process and write the story immediately. He doesn’t know what every experienced fiction writer knows—that the story does not exist before the act of writing, that it emerges through the flow of images and the rhythm of words. He fails to understand that while life may be spontaneous, art is not.

And so he makes mistakes. He sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft. He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his own imaginative and organizing powers. And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page, when the intense emotion he felt in real life is unrealized in what he writes. The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection. She knows that the Chekhov story she just read did not founder the way hers seems to. She loses confidence and hope, becomes intimidated by the magnitude of the problem that is the nascent story. What had seemed like an exciting and noble undertaking now seems impossible.

Do not try to write beyond what the first draft is meant to accomplish: Do not demand or expect a finished manuscript in one draft. The worst thing you may do in writing the first draft may be to focus on the form or content of the story. Do not even consider technical problems at this early stage. And do not let your critical self sit at your desk with your creative self. The critic will stifle the writer within.

It’s good advice, and even though I’ve heard it before it’s something I need to keep hearing. Because my “critical self” is fairly well entrenched in front of the keyboard. It’s probably a side effect of being a professional editor. I edit everything—it’s what I do! But (and this bears repeating over and over again if I’m ever to actually write this damn novel), I’ve already tried my way, and it hasn’t worked. So it’s time to once again attempt to embrace the chaos of the sloppy first draft.

But I’m still going to use proper punctuation when I do it. Let’s not get crazy or anything.