Paper Bits digital, paper, notes and bits.

Start On Paper: Shitty First Drafts

I don’t know about you, but my first draft always sucks.

Sucks. Clumsy, graceless, soulless crap. It’s nothing at all like what I first had in mind. That idea was great, but the best I could manage was to grab its ankle as it ran by; it came and went too quickly.

So what you need is a tool that lets you get things down fast. Capture that thought in some format that acts as the seed for the later, more refined product that you really want to produce. And that means modeless, quick capture, anywhere. You don’t want to have to swap windows in your web browser, or launch a text editor, before you can start to get it down. You’ll have missed it.

That goes triple for the graphic and industrial designers. It takes how long to launch Photoshop? Just so that you can get a digital sketch down? Is there that much advantage to limiting yourself to a 20″ glowing rectangle on your desk?

That’s why you start with paper.

Because, again, your first draft is going to suck. You want to get it out and down, so that you can move on, and redo it completely later.

And there’s something about paper that makes it a lot easier to do crappy work quickly: it’s just paper. Who cares if your sketch comes out looking like a frog being taken from behind by an e. coli bacterium? You’re going to move on to the next shitty sketch, and to the next, and to the next. And then you’re going to sift through them, and gather up maybe two or three, and dump the rest.

That’s the whole point. It’s just paper, so it doesn’t count.

I like to use index cards to get the ideas out, but suit yourself: use sticky notes, a sketchbook, notebook, printer paper, rolls of trace paper, whatever.

For me, the pull of index cards is that, no matter where I am, I can purge my head of a huge tangle of stuff, and translate it into a bunch of discrete, individually manageable physical things. Words, pictures, doodles, whatever; one card per idea.

This is a wonderful way to get a grasp on all the stuff swimming around my head.

The downside is that, after I’m done, my desk looks like it’s the starring role in a freakish index card bukkake flick sponsored by Office Depot.

(Try and get that image out of your head.)

This isn’t about tools, it’s about finding bottlenecks in the flow of work. Ideally, you want things to flow out of your head to an external memory space, so that you can iterate and refine them.

So, get your ideas out on paper. Scribble all over them and mark them up. When you’ve got a handle on things, and you feel like the limited medium of paper is slowing you down, then you start screwing around on the computer.

In case you’re wondering, the sketch at the top of this post is my first draft, along with a couple of other cards with some phrases jotted down, which I did while making coffee.

And now, back to work…

I’m not sure if the title of this post is a reference or just a coincidence, but “Shitty First Drafts” is the first chapter of a book about writing by Anne Lamott called Bird by Bird.

Lamott’s version of “Shitty First Drafts” is worth reading, IMO.

Not a coincidence. :) But thanks for the link!

Start On Paper: Shitty First Drafts

I don’t know about you, but my first draft always sucks.

Sucks. Clumsy, graceless, soulless crap. It’s nothing at all like what I first had in mind. That idea was great, but the best I could manage was to grab its ankle as it ran by; it came and went too quickly.

So what you need is a tool that lets you get things down fast. Capture that thought in some format that acts as the seed for the later, more refined product that you really want to produce. And that means modeless, quick capture, anywhere. You don’t want to have to swap windows in your web browser, or launch a text editor, before you can start to get it down. You’ll have missed it.

That goes triple for the graphic and industrial designers. It takes how long to launch Photoshop? Just so that you can get a digital sketch down? Is there that much advantage to limiting yourself to a 20″ glowing rectangle on your desk?

That’s why you start with paper.

Because, again, your first draft is going to suck. You want to get it out and down, so that you can move on, and redo it completely later.

And there’s something about paper that makes it a lot easier to do crappy work quickly: it’s just paper. Who cares if your sketch comes out looking like a frog being taken from behind by an e. coli bacterium? You’re going to move on to the next shitty sketch, and to the next, and to the next. And then you’re going to sift through them, and gather up maybe two or three, and dump the rest.

That’s the whole point. It’s just paper, so it doesn’t count.

I like to use index cards to get the ideas out, but suit yourself: use sticky notes, a sketchbook, notebook, printer paper, rolls of trace paper, whatever.

For me, the pull of index cards is that, no matter where I am, I can purge my head of a huge tangle of stuff, and translate it into a bunch of discrete, individually manageable physical things. Words, pictures, doodles, whatever; one card per idea.

This is a wonderful way to get a grasp on all the stuff swimming around my head.

The downside is that, after I’m done, my desk looks like it’s the starring role in a freakish index card bukkake flick sponsored by Office Depot.

(Try and get that image out of your head.)

This isn’t about tools, it’s about finding bottlenecks in the flow of work. Ideally, you want things to flow out of your head to an external memory space, so that you can iterate and refine them.

So, get your ideas out on paper. Scribble all over them and mark them up. When you’ve got a handle on things, and you feel like the limited medium of paper is slowing you down, then you start screwing around on the computer.

In case you’re wondering, the sketch at the top of this post is my first draft, along with a couple of other cards with some phrases jotted down, which I did while making coffee.

And now, back to work…