BRX Pro Tip: The Awful First Draft
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, today’s topic, the awful first draft.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:10] Yeah. A lot of people are procrastinating writing because they’re afraid their writing’s not very good. And that’s totally normal. A lot of people have insecurities around their writing ability, but I think what they don’t realize that most good writers have the same problem. The first draft of anything that anybody writes usually isn’t that great. And once you kind of reframe that in your head and know, “Oh, it’s normal to have an awful first draft so let me just knock that out as quickly as possible,” then it gives you freedom to just write and don’t judge, just get it all down on paper and then go back and then edit it. And that’s what good writers do. They’re not – the writing isn’t really the hardest part. It’s the editing that is the hardest part to take kind of raw concepts and words and then put them into a cohesive story or a cohesive post or article. That’s really where the rubber hits the road.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:12] So, if you know ahead of time that you’re going to go back over something and you’re going to make it better, then that takes a lot of the pressure off and it should make it less a chore and less something that you’re going to procrastinate around, knowing that, “Hey, today I’m just going to write my awful first draft. I’ll get that down. Then tomorrow I’ll come back and I’ll edit that.” And then, it just takes a lot of the pressure off yourself and you don’t have to make it perfect and you know it’s not going to be perfect. And you just want to get those ideas out of your head and you know that you’re going to make it better after editing it a couple of times.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:48] And then, now, there are so many, so much software out there where you can – you don’t even have to write it. You can just talk off the top of your head into a Google doc and it’ll record it and transcribe it for you and you can edit off of that. So, don’t be afraid of the first draft. It’s going to be bad. Just accept it. That’s the way it is. And then, just know that you’re going to make it better over time.
