I sat in a classroom in center city Philadelphia in August of 1995 making uncomfortable small talk with a dozen or so people. We were first-year grad students attending our first writing seminar with David Bradley, who had won a PEN/ Faulkner award for “The Chaneysville Incident.”
We were nervous. Releasing any fiction into the world took courage. I had heard that Bradley ran the workshop like a bootcamp. Others had heard the same. “One of the second years said he made a few people cry,” said a woman to my right.
“I hear he’ll make us re-write the same story the entire semester,” said a guy on the other side of the table.
True to form, Professor Bradley rolled into the classroom in combat fatigues, took off his hat, and turned his back to us. He didn’t welcome us. He didn’t introduce himself. Instead, he scratched at the chalkboard and said, “I’m going to give you the five most liberating words a writer can ever hear.”
After he had finished writing, Bradley stepped away from the board, smiled at the room, and read aloud what we were all digesting. “All first drafts are SH!T!”
He went on to tell us that his first draft might be a lot better than ours, but it was still SH!T. “Get over yourselves. All writing is re-writing. Your only goal with a first draft is to get it done. And then you can get to work.”
He was right. This was (and is) strangely liberating. We all grew thicker skin. Felt a little more comfortable offering criticism. He had released a pressure valve and let us know that our precious words would need a lot of work. And that was okay.
Legend has it that F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested Hemingway trim the opening section of “The Sun Also Rises” by some 2,500 words. Hemingway called his publisher and told him to start the novel with the line, “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” With that, he had struck the first 30 pages. “I rewrote the first part of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ at least fifty times,” said Hemingway. “You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is sh!t.”
Nothing comes easy. Not to David Bradley. Not to Hemingway. Not to me. Not to you. Twenty-nine years after that seminar, I still think about those words almost every day. They apply to writing, they apply to work, and they apply to almost anything worth doing. Get through the first draft and then get to work.
