Trashing the first draft

He looked at my screen, saw the first draft of an e-mail I’d been penning, and shook his head.

It wasn’t pretty. It didn’t read well. The message that should have been communicated within the first line was placed below another eight lines of filler. And to think I’d been working on this for the last fifteen minutes.

“My god,” his expression told me, “that’s a bad piece of e-mail.”

I sighed.

“It’s only the first draft,” I told him. I knew it was bad, as my first drafts almost always are, almost on purpose. You don’t look at a skeleton and think now there’s a good-looking guy/girl, do you?

I know what I’m doing, was my implied message.

As it turned out, the first draft was soon discarded — it’d served its purpose — and the polished second (and final) one crafted. In less than five minutes, I might add.

The first draft is, for me, always a piece of sh*t. It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to get the ideas floating in my head down in one place, where I can physically see and play around with them.

See my final draft and make a judgement if you want. But until then, just let me work my magic — the magic of iteration.