What a mess!

My first drafts are typically messy because not a lot of planning goes into them. I'm a sink-or-swim writer. I make a lot of false starts. But the other way, planning, outlining, misses a lot of surprises along the way, I've found. I only go this route as a last resort. What I've learned over long years is, Hey, hang in and keep the faith because it WILL all come together and eventually give you a draft you then can look at with the left side of your brain. But creation itself benefits from messy chaos. It really does.

What of the hardest things I teach my students is to keep the faith. Just because it's shit now doesn't mean it has to be shit later. I remember seeing early drafts of short stories by famous American writers -- they were terrible! But they BECAME great stories. It's a process. Keep the faith. Trust the process. Hard to do in the beginning, without a track record, but after you succeed a few times, you just learn to hang in and keep putting one sentence after the other. You keep the faith.

My novella is a bit of a mess right now, in other words, ha ha.