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Stephanie Leary

Writer, WordPress consultant, recent MLIS grad

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Letter to a young writer on surviving the first draft

November 29, 2010 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Delia Sherman has some lovely (and very timely) advice to a young relative on surviving the first draft.

Whatever you do (and I’m sure there are other things I’ve never tried or thought of), get that shitty first draft done. You can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. You can’t rewrite a faulty text that’s still mostly in your head. You can’t experience the thrill of making a recalcitrant scene or section work by changing a paragraph, cutting a sentence, adding the perfect line of dialogue if you haven’t written the clunky version first. Do whatever it takes.

Writing

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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