The Burst Pass – The Most Effective Way to Approach ‘First Drafts’

September 15, 2024 :: admisdev

This is almost like a trust fall exercise! Take a leap. Close your eyes. And let go. Admissionado will catch you. Mark Twain famously once said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” A perfectly-expressed idea is nearly impossible to produce on a first try. It has to be located amongst the rubble, excavated, then cultivated, and honed, and ultimately, polished to perfection. Your goal when taking your first whack at an essay isn’t to produce perfection. Instead, it’s to produce rubble that contains the *potential* seeds of perfection. 

You need to establish the conditions (in your mind) to let those potential seeds, those nuggets of gold, find their way out. The part of your brain that’s controlling, and critical, and obsessed with perfection… needs to take a knee! At this moment, we need the beast within to be uncaged. The taming that is essential, comes later.

1. Have a vague sense of what you want to write about. Don’t worry too much about the precise format, precise style. Just a vague sense of topic and style, and that’s all you need.
2. Next, be distraction-free. Whatever that means for you. Phone off? Door locked? In a cafe with music blasting in your ears? Whatever enables you to achieve laser focus on the task at hand, get it done. Set the conditions. Then?
3. Make like Elsa and LET IT GO. 

Let new ideas interrupt your thought mid-sentence. Don’t edit it. Want to meander and let a stray thought enter the draft? Do it. Want to finish a sentence without a period because your hands are eager to type a stray thought? “Du it.” It’s okay for this draft to have misspelled words, sentence fragments, incomplete thoughts, and be totally incoherent. Get a rhythm. Write fast. Don’t overthink. Just commit. 

It may be very comfortable and easy for some, and extremely uncomfortable for others. You have nothing to lose. There is no one here to judge your writing, or give it a grade, none of that. Get into a ‘fugue state.’ Your hands should be sore and exhausted because you’re typing faster than you’re used to. Good. Maybe your heart beats faster because you’ve tapped into something that animates you, makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you fiery. Just … fly. 

If you end up with 400 words or 4,000, it doesn’t matter. As long as you’ve written ‘unconsciously’ nothing else matters. Success here isn’t how good the draft is, it’s ‘did you allow yourself to burst’? If yes, that’s the win.