September 23, 2024

Shitty First Drafts

The process is the point—sometimes you have to take the long-way-'round.

Learning from artists one admires is a critical part of the learning journey in every craft, role, or profession. I’ve gathered many books over the years, as I’ve iteratively learned; improved—grown.

Last Friday afternoon, as I was having a wrap-up call with a client, we got to talking about the results of the two month engagement. I can’t recall the exact conversational thought-path we took to get there, but at one point I said, “the process is the point.”

She laughed.

“That’s funny. Everything else tends to say the outcomes are the point. First time I’ve heard the process is the point.”

Right! We were talking about generative artifintel—

An Aside
Artifintel
Definition: Portmanteau for artificial intelligence, or AI.

Context: I get tired of writing A.I. or LLMs for large language models, so using this new word instead

—and how the process of creating something is the point. It’s an aspect working as a designer that’s repeatedly aphorised. Trust the process. The act of creating always follows some sort of process—internally or externally. The angel doesn’t reveal itself in the marble, you have to dig it out.1

Writing on writing

It was either in one of my later secondary school writing classes or my first year of University when I first read Anne Lamott’s essay, Shitty First Drafts, excerpted from her book Bird by Bird. I enjoyed it immediately, and it’s such an applicable essay in almost every craft I practice—most notably in writing, design, and development.

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”2

This resonates.

Deeply.

Just trying to get things out there. See how things work, feel how they fit together. Keep editing. Adjust details. Say that thing. Again. Cross them out, replace a word, read it, speak it. Italicise.

Bird by Bird is one of those books resting on my shelf, that I come back to occasionally to refresh and reacquaint myself with lessons from time-traveling mentors.

Along with Annel Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a few others have well-worn creases—patina of use and repeated reference.

• Bird by Bird
  Some Instructions on Writing and Life
  Anne Lamott

• Zen in the Art of Writing
  Releasing the creative genius within you
  Ray Bradbury

• 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
  Proven Professional Techniques for Writing with Style and Power
  Gary Provost

• The Practice
  Shipping Creative Work
  Seth Godin

• Steering the Craft
  A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
  Ursula Le Guin

All of these are titled, in some way, about process and evolving your writing. The Zen of Practice. Improving. Steering the Craft.

Ursula Le Guin’s who I’ve been reading recently.

It took me 30-minutes to get through the Prologue, just because of how much I was marking it up. As I searched the internet for quotes from the book—suddenly sidetracked by the vast preservation of knowledge and lost Internet works the Internet Archive represents—I came across an article she wrote in response to a the question, “How do you make something good?”

Inexperienced writers tend to seek the recipes for writing well. You buy the cookbook, you take the list of ingredients, you follow the directions, and behold! A masterpiece! The Never-Falling Soufflé!

Wouldn’t it be nice? But alas, there are no recipes. We have no Julia Child. Successful professional writers are not withholding mysterious secrets from eager beginners. The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time. (Guin, 2015)3

Continually, each author writes about the process. It’s about making things better. Improving over time. Yet, all of this falls short in one important way—writing is a solitary practice.

What happens when this process is explicitly collaborative?

This is when it becomes design.

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A Forgotten Language

Something I see tumbling about on my internet experience is the conversation about the Process. Clients and stakeholders expecting high-fidelity comps soon after the start of a project. The laments that designers these days move past the low-fidelity prototypes of paper and sticky-notes, going straight into visual design before prototyping things out.

Compound these spectrum of perspectives with the explorative and exploitative usage of artifintel today.

An Aside
Artifintel
Eh, that doesn’t sound natural. I don’t like it. Nevermind.

Multiply these perspectives with the explorative’n’exploitative use of artificial intelligence today. All industruies—though in my framing, notably: writing, design, and software development industries, inclusive of the breadth of what those mean—are experiencing quakes as the tectonic plates shift in the how, why, and impact of what we do.

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

That’s how the saying goes.4

Well doesn’t mean all shiny from the get go. There’s hard work to do in the middle bits. We have tools today that can make things easier, quicker, and cheaper to build. It’s magic—at least the way it’s used and marketed today. Even magic comes at a cost. This means: slowing down, taking the long way around, and spending more time in the messy Middle Magic of process.

The process is the point.

Making anything well involves a commitment to the work. And that requires courage: you have to trust yourself. It helps to remember that the goal is not to write a masterpiece or a best-seller. The goal is to be able to look at your story and say, Yes. That’s as good as I can make it.

And then, once in a while, none of that sweat and trial and error and risk-taking is necessary. Something just comes to you as you write. You write it down, it’s there, it’s really good. You look at it unbelieving. Did I do that?

I think that kind of gift mostly comes as the pay-off for trying, patiently, repeatedly, to make something well. (Guin, 2015)

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