Top 84 Your First Draft Quotes
#1. To have someone like Clint Eastwood come along and shoot your first draft as written is just any screenwriter's dream. And Clint is very straightforward. If it's good enough to get his attention, it's good enough to produce.
J. Michael Straczynski
#2. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.
Chevy Stevens
#3. Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.
Angeline Trevena
#5. if you are satisfied with your first draft you are not writing, you are excreting
Jennifer Ross
#6. You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.
Sandra Cisneros
#7. You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.
Sean Connery
#8. Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.
Chuck Wendig
#9. (about divorce): Sometimes you have to scrap your first draft and start over.
Danielle Ganek
#10. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.
Tobsha Learner
#11. We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.
Gene Luen Yang
#12. Learn to take criticism. Your first draft won't be perfect, and it's damaging to the book to think that it is. Every great book you've ever read has been rewritten a dozen times. This is the hardest think to learn (trust me), but very, very important.
Patrick Ness
#13. I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.
Brit Marling
#14. Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It's taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we'll see whatever happens with that.
Ethan Suplee
#15. I was a pitcher, shortstop and outfielder, and the Yankees tried to sign me out of high school as a first-round draft pick in 1981. I turned them down to go to college.
Bo Jackson
#16. In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948.
Rene Cassin
#17. It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.
Will Shetterly
#18. I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.
Robin Wasserman
#19. I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.
Wes Craven
#20. All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
T.E. Lawrence
#21. In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
James Patterson
#22. I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.
Sue Miller
#23. I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.
Terry Tempest Williams
#24. The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
Jonathan Haidt
#25. A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.
David Macinnis Gill
#26. My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
Maya Lin
#27. Unfortunately, most news writing is the product of a first draft culture.
Michael Gartner
#28. MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT.
Various
#29. I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years.
Poppy Z. Brite
#30. Being a first-round draft pick means nothing to me without my education.
Cardale Jones
#31. Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.
Guy Garvey
#32. I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.
Ray Bradbury
#33. Your first attempt will be terrible ... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft ... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.
Pamela Druckerman
#34. The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes - but that's the same with any creative outlet.
Tess Gerritsen
#35. Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat - chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.
Don Roff
#36. A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.
James A. Owen
#37. Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.
Rose Tremain
#38. Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
Joyce Carol Oates
#39. It's important to put aside your internal editor and just get words down on the page when working on a first draft.
S.J. Scott
#40. Writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
Shannon Hale
#41. I think the biggest thing for me now is that I have a better understanding of what to expect as far as things go and the scheduling. Your first year is a little crazy because you are preparing for the draft and don't know where you will be playing.
Giovani Bernard
#42. The first draft you're pretty much on your own, so I love that. I can let my imagination go wild. I just go crazy. Then, over the years - it takes years to write these things, to make these things come to pass - there are many, many, many drafts. For Maleficent, there were at least 15.
Linda Woolverton
#43. The first draft is your "vomit onto the keyboard" draft, wherein your task is to simply keep moving and outrun your doubts.
Sean Platt
#44. In Hollywood, writers are considered only the first draft of human beings.
Frank Deford
#45. The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
#46. One of the greatest benefits of writing a truly awful, lousy, no good first draft is that it can only get better from there.
Martha Alderson
#47. I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
Susan Sontag
#48. Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.
Matt Hughes
#49. I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.
Barack Obama
#50. Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
#52. To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft.
J.J. Abrams
#53. Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
William Faulkner
#54. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
George Stephen
#55. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Jonathan Stroud
#56. When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.
Len Wein
#57. The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!
Heather Robinson
#58. Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don't be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love.
Francesca Lia Block
#59. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue
#60. I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
Lydia Davis
#61. I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.
John Niven
#62. I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.
Noah Hawley
#64. I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
Colm Toibin
#65. Hardly anything is as exciting or as diverse, as strong a confirmation of life and hope and the universe's urge towards creativity, as a lively compost heap or the first draft of a novel.
Margaret Simons
#66. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.
Marie Colvin
#67. The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.
Jill McCorkle
#68. Still, I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
Stephen King
#69. But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,
Pat Schneider
#70. I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.
John Dufresne
#71. Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.
Rebecca Stead
#72. If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#73. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.
Elliott Colla
#74. I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
Lauren Groff
#75. I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.
Richard Greenberg
#76. So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
Peter Carey
#77. Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.
Dito Montiel
#78. My first draft is the skeleton of the story. I have to go back over it from start to finish repeatedly, adding all the layers of meat to the bones until, eventually, it becomes a living, breathing thing.
Alisha Ashton
#79. Until recently, the question was 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' It should have been changed to 'Why can't both sexes be more like the best parts of each other?' Instead, the pendulum swung to the 1960s feminist lapel button Adam Was a First Draft. True enough. So are we all.
Warren Farrell
#80. When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that.
Heidi Julavits
#81. Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#82. They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.
Nick Hornby
#83. When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.
Scott Westerfeld
#84. I get ill when I'm writing because I'm so focused on it, and it can take a year or two. Often, I knock out the first draft very quickly. I can do it in five to six weeks. Then, it takes a year of rewriting it and rewriting it.
Eran Creevy
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