Every autumn I take twelve writers for four weeks with a single rule: the draft is allowed to be bad. No, worse than bad — it is required to be unfinished, unbalanced, and faintly embarrassing. Perfectionists, I tell them on day one, will have to wait in the hall.
This year's group taught me as much as I taught them. A retired engineer wrote a ghost story set in a lighthouse supply closet. A night-shift nurse produced forty pages about her grandmother's soup, and we all cried on a Tuesday. The pattern never varies: week one is terror, week two is mess, week three is momentum, and week four — always week four — somebody reads aloud and the room goes silent in the good way.
“You cannot revise a blank page, but you can revise an ugly one. Ugly is raw material. Blank is just blank.”
My three rules for first drafts, refined over a decade of workshops: write before you check anything; end each session mid-sentence so tomorrow has a doorway; and never, ever read the whole thing until the month is over. The draft knows what it is becoming before you do. Let it.
Autumn places open in June and go quickly. Bring a notebook you are not afraid to ruin.
Eleanor Ashgrove
Founder of the Slow Draft workshop.