“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
—E.M. Forster
If you’re making, you’re making a mess. You’ll never get it right the first time. Anne Lamott calls these “shitty first drafts.” They’re part of the process. So resist the temptation to erase these attempts, unusable as they might be.
Instead, let them become the soil. Creation is easier when you think of it as revision—everything is a remix, anyway. You first attempts are the map. The mess is part of the method.
Don’t hide these drafts in the basement, neither. You can be fancy and curate them, as though you needed to present them at trial, to prove you suffered for your craft. If the courtroom metaphor invokes anxiety, imagine you’re leaving fodder for future historians trying to make sense of your work.
But trying to gussy up your drafts to help convince future historians that you’re enlightened is pointless, manipulative, and impossible:
It’s not the point of art to age well, because no one can predict the future. The truth is what you believe for now, and art is a reflection of “what you believe for nows” across the infinite smear of nows we call time. The word “Shaboozey” could be a slur in 2928. It’s not the point of art to age well, because no one can predict the future.
–Don't be so hard on the past
You keep your drafts to see how you work. Wading into failure is prickly curriculum, but your first attempts are the purest map of a mind. It’s forensic evidence of your thinking. A place to learn about your patterns, your stuck points, your breakthroughs. Maybe you’ll become an enthusiast of your own weird process. Embrace the clunk.
At the very least, it’s a reminder that no one gets it right the first time. Every finished work is a granite mountain of failure, topped with a faint dusting of “done.”