In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s book on writing, she recommends writing “shitty first drafts”. I am using this advice as I bank blog posts. This morning I reviewed The Practice, and about 5 minutes ago I finished writing the post about banking posts. At the end of that post, I wrote that I had more tactics, and shitty first drafts is one of them.

Right now, I am typing this out as fast as I can, not editing. Just writing. This practice makes it so I have some raw material to work with. Since it’s now January 28th, and this post won’t be published until February 11th, I have 2 weeks to edit it.

Having gotten this far, I think I might leave this one the way this is so that you can see what a bad first draft looks like. In general, I would try to tighten it up—I can see that this one is a bit wordy already.

At this point, I’m just leaning into it. If this is going to be a shitty post, I might as well make it extra shitty so that you can see that there’s no need to have a polished post right away.

The only hard part is coming up with some kind of ending, but I usually find one in the edit.