Drafts: they would make you a better writer. I had to remind myself that I was in college and that professors casually say words like “shitty.” Later that day, my 300-level English professor dropped a beautiful “fuck” during the class discussion of how white women used black men to fulfill sexual fantasies in Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man." But back to the point, it’s okay to write shitty drafts because that’s how you regurgitate your world. At first it will be messy, it may make you gag at the sight of it. But you have to clean up.

I feel like I write shitty rough drafts all too often. I feel shitty reading them, then shitty for thinking my writing is shitty. The cycle perpetuates itself, and often times I leave pieces of writing in forgotten and lost folders because I can’t bother with trying to fix what’s too far gone. I find those pieces months or years later and wonder what exactly they were doing beneath my bed or behind the dresser. I’d see all of the good in them, all the things that worked.

I realized in class that shitty first drafts do need to be written, and that only after I left them alone and came back to them could I detach myself from the initial feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration. I had to forget my own words to stumble upon them and relearn them with a new pair of eyes. I had to write, live, then write again.

I don’t fear shitty first drafts anymore. I write them frantically. I write them excitedly. With shitty first drafts come potential. With shitty first drafts come run-on sentences, terrible comma splices, overuse of flowery language - but they all fall into the right places later on.