Nails On A Chalkboard - #MFRWauthor

Hello and welcome to week 8 of the #MFRWauthor blog hop. This week we are talking 'worst' writing advice we've been given.

Can you guess what mine is??? Yep, if you said  'all first drafts are shitty' then you would be correct! Why are writers told this? Where did this 'advice' come from? Why are we encouraged to just write like the wind and worry about revising later?

Are we not all individuals?

Does no one think not every one works this way?

I don't get it. 

There are memes galore to be found on the internet about the shitty first drafts. Famous authors have said this in one form or another and some people hold it as gospel. Why? In no other job is that an acceptable statement. Writers are encouraged to treat this as their business. Some look down on the idea of 'writer's block' for the same sort of reason, but in the same breath give this little 'pep-talk' of sorts.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that my first drafts are the same that go to print, they're not. There is editing, and revising. I spend plenty of time in 'editing hell'. But I also don't just 'word vomit' my first drafts.

I'm a pantser, I hate pre-planning my books and I take it one chapter, paragraph, sentence at a time. Because of that, I spend a lot of time thinking through what just happened, and what should happen next. I have to make sure that all the random thoughts that come to me about my stories match up and I don't have holes and other issues.

That means 2 things.
1) I'm slow
2) The 1st draft is pretty damn complete

I've referred to the editing phase in less than favorable ways. I don't like it. And that's probably because I spend so much damn time struggling to pull the story together to begin with. I don't do BIG revisions of cutting whole chapters or reworking plot points to add or remove subplots. It's not how I work. Maybe that's why I take such offense to being told that ALL first drafts are shitty.

They're not.

Each author has their process. Some plot. Some pants. Some skip around. Some write in a linear A-to-B fashion. There's first person or third person. Not to mention all the various genres and sub-genres. So why, with all the other differences, is such a sweeping, generalized statement applied to all those individual authors?

Taking a saying from Denzel's character in Philadelphia, "someone explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old."

So there you have it. There's other advice out there that will make me cringe, but this one irks me more. Be sure to stop by and see what advice the other authors aren't a fan of.

Until next time
~Meka