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That line about 'write the bad draft' finally clicked for me
I was scrolling through a thread here last Tuesday and someone wrote 'your first draft is just you telling yourself the story.' I've seen that advice a hundred times but it never stuck. This time I was stuck on a fantasy prompt about a lighthouse keeper who finds a door in the cliff, and I kept deleting every opening. So I sat down and wrote 800 words of pure garbage, just the keeper complaining about wet socks and the door being stuck. Then I went back and the third paragraph actually had the hook I needed. Has anyone else had a specific phrasing of common advice just break through out of nowhere?
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miaharris15d ago
Exactly the same thing happened to me. Saw "perfect is the enemy of done" a million times, then one day it just hit different and I wrote a whole chapter of garbage that somehow had the skeleton of something good. Sometimes the brain just needs the right door to open.
That stuck door thing is relatable though. Maybe the keeper just needed to complain first before the story could show up.
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