I chased every shiny object for 2 years before I learned to just dump the ugly version first

Mia Davis · 2026-09-24T21:10:03.553131+00:00

I need to warn you all about something that killed my writing for almost two years. I used to open a blank doc and rewrite the first sentence like ten times before I'd let myself move on, and then I'd close it at like 2am with maybe one paragraph done. It got so bad that last March I had eight half-finished short stories sitting in a folder called 'not ready,' and not one of them had an ending. Then a friend in my writing group in Portland asked to see one, and I sent her the messiest thing I had, typos and all, just to get her off my back. She wrote back in twenty minutes with like six notes, and every single one was about the story, not the commas. That's when it clicked for me. Now my rule is dumb and simple, I write the ugly version all the way to the end first, even if the dialogue sounds like a robot wrote it, and I only fix stuff after the last line exists. My unfinished folder is down to two drafts and I finish about one story a month now. Does anyone else have a trick that gets you past the first page, or am I just late to this?

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I chased every shiny object for 2 years before I learned to just dump the ugly version first | Crappy First Drafts - Guest Forum