KC Davis on writing shitty first drafts and getting it wrong
Part 2 of our conversation explores writing and balancing life with our passion projects
One of the biggest places I’m growing right now is around how much an editor is able to help me. And that might seem obvious or even self-congratulatory since I am an editor myself. But in more than 16 years as an editor, my writing had never felt the wonderful lift from having a fellow editor give it a second set of eyes or an editorial high-five.
I explored this offline with KC Davis, author of How to Keep House While Drowning and creator of TikTok account @domesticblisters, which has over 1.6 million followers, and that’s our starting point for this sidebar of the interview. (Read our longer conversation here.)
Amanda: Why was it never apparent to me that this is a team effort to get your ideas out into the world? I honestly don't know. Do you think that's neurodiversity? Or what…?
KC: I think that's just human; I also had to learn something similar. So I am with the same publisher for my next book. But the editor that I worked with on my first book ended up going to a different publishing house. So I have a different editor for my second book and I'm getting used to a different person. And both times I have felt so self conscious sending my first drafts of things because I don't think that they're written very well, and I'm so afraid of someone being like, “Oh, God, this is bad!”
And you know I think it's Brené Brown that talks about the shitty first draft. And she's actually talking not about writing at all. She's talking about the stories that we tell ourselves. So we have an interaction with someone, and the more we think about it, we go, “Oh they must really hate me.” But Brené points out that everyone has that shitty first draft in their head. And you have to go check it out with people and come up with a different story—a more accurate and a more compassionate story.
Amanda: Right, that shift is something I really experienced with finding my own editor. After years of holding everything really tightly to my chest and being afraid to let it out into the world. In a lot of ways, writing is my special interest and I don’t want anyone stomping on it.
KC: Yeah! And I just started realizing, if you don't write the shitty first draft, you're not ever gonna get the good last draft. I would say to my editor, “I'm going to send you some bad writing, because it's the only way I know to get my ideas out.” Because that's what was freezing me. I was staring at the page and I knew I had an idea I wanted to talk about, but I couldn’t think of how to start the sentence. And I realized that I just needed to write down whatever God-forsaken mess of an incoherent stream of thought that was in my head. Because I can take something existing and fix it and work on it and create ideas from it. But I don't know how to get something on the page. So I just tell myself, “KC, you have to write it. You have to write a bad draft before you can get anything good.”
Amanda: I don't know how many times I’ve told other writers that if the first draft isn’t messy, you probably haven't pulled out enough. If it's too tight and rigid, it means that there's something missing. Maybe there's just a season where we have let it be messy. And if it's not shitty…
KC: …Something's missing. And I do think it’s different for everyone. My husband writes for a living but not the same kind of writing I do. He's an attorney, but all he does is research and write. And he's the kind of person who will learn and learn and learn, and then he will ponder for days. And you can see it rolling around in his head like a piece of clay that he's looking over at every different aspect, at every different angle, and then, one day he sits down and he's like, “Hmm! I've got it!” And he writes whatever he's writing.
I am not like that. I cannot do anything internally. I can only process and think about things externally. I have to talk about it.
This happens sometimes with me in interviews where I'm not a very good person to interview, because whatever you're saying is just sparking somewhere I want to go. And I'm almost monologuing at someone and not having a real back-and-forth conversation. So I have to hire someone to just sit there and talk to me about my idea, or have a friend and tell them, “Hey, I need to turn this concept over.”
And I think with writing I also need to have people who I'm just talking about it with, and as I'm talking to them, I will say something and I’ll be like, “Damn! That was a good sentence.” And then we're like, “Oh, that's the direction we need to go, right?” So I think as far as understanding your neurodivergence or your neurotype, or just even your personality [it’s important to know]: which one are you?
Are you someone that needs to roll it around in your head? Stop freaking out about the fact, there's nothing on the paper, because there'll be nothing on paper for 6 weeks, and all of a sudden you'll sit down for 3 days, and it'll be there. Or are you like me? Where, you need to be talking to someone every day about it, and then you can put it on paper, or are you someone who just needs to write, write, write, write, write, even if it's shitty. And you'll find your way.
Amanda: Absolutely! I want to wrap up by sharing what I think is a very relatable reader question with you. Sarah says:
“I'm a marketing director by day, and an aspiring historical fiction novelist in the wee hours of the morning. I went to bed last night with a few unfinished dishes and I missed a girl's night, because I knew that if I did either, then I would not write or edit in the morning, and then I'd just be frustrated all day.
But then, other days my two little boys need a snuggle where I could feel myself teetering to burn out for the week, and I know I have to sleep. How do I balance drowning and fighting for my dream? Where is the decision tree for this?”
KC: Well, she already is. I mean, that's exactly what she's doing. She's just making moment to moment decisions that best balance what she needs right now with the people around her need right now, and what she wants for the future. I mean, there are some days where you cancel the girls night so that you can write, and there are some nights where you decide not to write, because you need sleep, and there are some nights when you don't do either, because your kid needs to be cuddled. There isn't an official right way to navigate that.
Everyone is navigating those decisions and is doing it messy and is also thinking, “I don't know if I'm doing it right. I don't know if that was the right decision.” And I always say, “Think of diversity over quality,” if that makes sense, or it's like the one time that quantity over quality actually matters. Because as long as you're not picking the same thing every single night, you're fine.
Because you do need to write sometimes, and you do need to sleep sometimes. And your kids need cuddles sometimes. And as you move through, you're going to be getting feedback from yourself and your environment, of the people around you: What of those things needs to be happening? To what degree or in what ratio to the others? And it's not a matter of nailing it. It's just a matter of being aware and non-judgmentally choosing whatever it feels like needs to be the thing, you know, and she's already doing it.
She just believes that there's a right way to do it. And there isn't. It always feels messy. It always feels nebulous like you're just guessing out of nowhere. There is no roadmap for that. There's no decision tree for that. And really it's just about: “These are three things I want. These are three things important to me, and I just have to juggle them. And I can't do them all at once. So I have to pick which two of the three I'm gonna do. And I have to switch up which two of the three I'm doing with enough frequency that I'm not causing harm to myself or others, and I'm not sacrificing one of the things that matters to me.”
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Tell me what you think!
Who in your life serves as your "editor" or second set of eyes, and how do they enhance your work or creative process?
Do you resonate with the idea of a "shitty first draft"? Share a time when letting go of perfection helped you progress in your writing.
Can you commiserate with things feeling nebulous, like you're just guessing out of nowhere?
Hey! Thanks for chiming in. 🧡
I love the imagery of a person like KC or Brene helping us take the first few steps forward. 🤗Speaking of, I did cross check KC’s Brene reference and Brene took Anne’s original framing of writing a shitty first draft but put in context of the interpersonal narratives we tell ourselves and how we need kind people in our lives to tell us the truth about who we are. 🧡
Your series of interviews (with KC and Erin) is really helping shift my paradigm in a healthy direction. I never thought that my writing, which feels like such a solitary, uncharted endeavor, could be in active partnership with others. I never thought of an editor as someone who could be with me in the most solitary spaces. And now that you’ve framed it that way (and sorry, i know I may be mis-paraphrasing in a way that suits me) I feel like that’s exactly what I need.
I feel like my major struggle with a “shitty first draft” is that writing—just saying what I have to say—is so damn scary. A lot of times I struggle to connect with how people talk about shitty first drafts, because it often comes down to “just start writing, and keep writing.” But I feel like I have to dig so deep to find language for the thing, that my pace for a first draft is generally 3 or 4 sentences an hour. If I try to speed it up, I can write a whole draft and not actually have said the thing. Like it’s not even a first draft. It’s just words.
But the idea of someone accompanying me in finding that language sounds so lovely—both for the outcome of the process, and to soothe the terror ramped up in my nervous system every time I write.