Why You Need to Write Horrible First Drafts: Life Lessons about Perfectionism from the Adaptation Movie
The cursor is staring back at you, accusing you of sitting in front of the empty, white page. You know what you want to write, a great thing, but the fear of placing a terrible word onto the page is paralyzing. This is the Perfectionist’s Paradox: the desire for perfection is so compelling that it prevents you from starting.
For writers, thesis students to be written by, or for that matter, anyone who ever tries to initiate a new project, this fear renders the creative process one of grueling torture. But suppose that such conflict is not a sign of failure but a dirty, even necessary process?
We look to the 2002 meta-masterwork Adaptation to find the most valuable lesson in embracing failure. It is a fine movie; it’s a movie primer on navigating the terrifying realm of creation.
The Brilliance of Failure: Charlie Kaufman’s Arduous Journey
Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, is a semi-fictionalized account of Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), who grapples with a paralyzing bout of writer’s block. His assignment is to adapt Susan Orlean’s novel, The Orchid Thief, but the novel resists conventional Hollywood construction, mirroring Charlie’s agonized creative and mental anguish.
Charlie is frozen by his need to create sublime, original paintings. He abhors formula but can’t simply stop. His internal struggle is educational: Perfection is the enemy of the finished piece.
The genius of the adaptation movie is that it shows us the painful truth: you have to endure the terrible, cheesy, or “terrible” draft to get to the finish. Your first draft is not your final work; it is but the clay that you need to shape.
The Universal Struggle of Movie Adaptation
The theme of wrestling with film adaptation is really the perfect metaphor for any writing dilemma. What adaptation is all about is, essentially, taking a grand, sprawling idea—such as a ginormous academic discipline or a magnificent novel—and streamlining it into a tidy, compact form.
When a studio approves a film adaptation, they realize the finished movie will be drastically different from the source material. It will cut characters, simplify subplots, and change endings. The process has to be untidy because the two mediums (the book/concept and the finished script) are mutually exclusive in nature.
The job of movie adaptation—condensing complexity into clarity—is the same job you face in taking notes and ideas and translating them into an intelligible essay.
The Monumental Task: The Stephen King Example
Consider the task of developing a truly huge project, like the Stephen King stand movie adaptation. Stephen King’s The Stand is one gigantic post-apocalyptic epic novel with hundreds of characters. Even for a career pro, bringing a mountain of content to market entails starting out with a terrible plan and continually revising.
This is especially true when doing a big student capstone project or a long report. That there is a stephen king stand movie adaptation indicates no project is too big or too sprawling to be held together if you simply will let the opening stages be messy and bad.
3 Practical Steps to Begin Your “Bad Draft”
You don’t need an imaginary duplicate to decide; you just have to apply the lessons learned from the adaptation movie:
Lower the Bar for 30 Minutes: Charlie Kaufman struggled because his aspiration was “transcendent art.” For a short time (30 minutes), lower your aspiration to “coherent sentences.” Write whatever is in your mind. Don’t worry about typos, grammar, or flow. This offloads the perfectionist burden. This helps students in particular, who waste valuable time cleaning up their bibliography before writing a sentence.
Change Your “Set”: Charlie found a spark of energy when he left his dark office. If you’re stuck, grab your laptop and move. A park bench, a library corner, or simply turning your chair 90 degrees disrupts the psychological set involved in putting things off.
Describe the Pain: Spend the first 10 minutes writing a “bad draft” of why you are blocked. Why is the deadline scary? Why is the topic difficult? This breaks the fear and often reveals the underlying conflict, which can be the main theme of your actual project.
Conclusion
The blank page anxiety and the perfectionism are human struggles superbly brought out in the adaptation movie. Your first draft should be a dirty storyboard—it’s not for the final screen, but it’s necessary to map the journey. Stop waiting for the brilliance and start embracing the mess. By allowing yourself permission to write badly, you guarantee that you will end up writing something truly great.