"Your 20s are about having the courage to write a frightful first draft"

I hope to share this snippet from the book "101 secrets for your twenties" by Paul Angone*:

"I think most of us went into our 20s expecting a box office smash, when instead our twentysomething story is not even going to make it to the theaters. At least not yet.

As a writer, I used to be bummed about all the time and effort I spent writing hundreds of pages that would never see the light. But as I grew as a writer I learned that you have to write a lot of really atrocious first drafts before you can find the story you need to tell.

Our 20s are the same way. For many years it will be about getting words down on paper that we'll edit later. Plans will fail because that's part of Frightful First Draftdom. But five rewrites later, we'll lean back and say, "Wow, that's actually not too bad."

We have to be willing to allow ourselves to write some terrible first drafts.

You can't have a good story without a good struggle."

*Angone, P. (2013) 101 secrets for your twenties. Kindle edition. (Learned the importance of doing citations when I was asked for the reference for a quotation I quoted on this blog a few years ago but because there was no citation, I had no idea where I got it from!)