ROUGH Drafts

Dear Writer,

When I looked at the rough draft for my first and only novel I thought to myself, wow. This stinks. I've grown up with these fantastic books that were on the eighth, ninth or tenth draft when I read them. I'd never seen a rough draft of anyone else's book, so I compared mine to theirs. Mine lost.

Do you ever feel like your writing is too sloppy? That your rough draft is too... well.... rough? I have.
The books that we've grown up with, that inspired us to write in the first place, are not comparable to ours. Theirs are finished, ours are not.

Writer, rough drafts are supposed to be full of grammatical errors, missing punctuation, and remnants that you wrote that scene with WAAAAAY too much caffeine in your system. Rough drafts are your story in it's purest form, as messy as it may seem. You know why? Because this is our story just as it came out of us, just as we breathed it into this world.

It's kind of like when a mother gives birth to her child. She's kind of messy and not the prettiest to look at as soon as she arrives, but no one in the room is saying, "Eww! Look at how messy that baby is". They're all saying, "That baby is beautiful, her Mama must be so proud." They all know that babies have to be cleaned up before they're introduced to the world.

Sounds kind of like your first draft, huh Writer? Messy, not the prettiest to look at, but it's yours. You put your blood, sweat, and tears into that draft, so don't give up on it now. Rough drafts are supposed to be rough,Writer, nothing within this world is perfect by default. It takes a lot of hard work to get it that way.

You've done the hard part, you've told yourself a good story. Now, it's time to do the hard part, making it ready for the world to see. This draft is your baby,Writer, it may be messy, it may be flawed. It may have no punctuation other than a couple of stray commas and quotation marks, but that's okay, it's your mess, and you can't abandon it now.

Writer, I know that rough draft looks so rough... it looks sooo rough Writer, but like with everything, with a little elbow grease, it'll get better. This is your story, and it's waiting for you to share it with the world.

-Libby

"All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty." Proverbs 14:23