On Shitty First Drafts

of our life stories

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Do you ever think about the end of your life? Not just your death, but how it ends? Your life. Is there a good plot to it? Do you ever think of your life as a story? Like, what if your life was in a novel? We can’t usually know or choose how we die, but we can take the pen of how we live.

Dan Allender talks about this in his book To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future. Many of us are aiming to be good people, and trying to figure out what that means.  We try to live up to the version of goodness that is in our heads. We get caught up in all of life’s demands, and the next thing you know, we find ourselves getting old. We miss the story of God. And our distinction in it. Allender compares our own lived lives to writing:

We each are responsible for writing our story, including our ending. The difference between living well verses writing well is that writing requires me to face the fact that my first draft is a mess, needs significant editing, and requires much more honesty, depth, and passion.  Yet for most people living well means simply doing our best according to the standards of our culture. Am I ready to move toward the kind of meaning that far exceeds being a “good” person?  

That made me think of Anne Lamott’s shitty first drafts. All good writers write them, according to Lamott:

People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.

This is a life-thing too, right? We are so afraid of that shitty first draft. So we don’t go for it. We don’t take the time to reflect, contemplate, and self-evaluate because we don’t have the confidence. We look at others that seem to know a secret that we haven’t yet. Lamott talks about the value of the shitty first draft. Since you know that it’s going to be shitty, and no one is going to see it, you let the uninhibited child-like parts come out of you, “let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place.” Your imagination can play. And even though there will be much editing, there are some gems that you can pluck out of there.

How can this convert to our life stories? Obviously we aren’t to go about proudly being the shitty first draft version of ourselves. But if there is a story in there, deep inside ourselves, that we are to dig out—and to live out—we are going to need the skills of a good writer. This means that maybe we will take some risks at the risk of looking inelegant.  We will think of ways to tap into our playfulness and imagination. Look for those gems. And face the truths—the secrets that we even hide from ourselves—of the many shitty first drafts of the pages of our stories. Because a good ending requires more honesty, depth, and passion. Allender encourages us that “a good but unexamined life will be high on duty and not likely to celebrate the odd paradoxes, the ironic coincidences, and the humor of being dirt.”

Amazingly, he reminds us that God invites us to be coauthors, collaborating in the story of our lives. He delights in this. We do this prayerfully by living with passion and attentiveness. “A merely good life reveals little beyond the fact that goodness exists. But a life that knows its plot, characters, setting, dialogue, and themes will possess a clear and abiding passion that reveals something unique about the Author.”

We don’t need to hide the shitty first drafts. We need to examine them. And man, somehow by God’s design and grace, we even need to live them. Every one of us. So we can see all the junk that was inside us, and toss it. And look again for the gems that will be developed in the second and third drafts.