on drafting

I'm reading Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide, from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, Edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, and it's absolutely fascinating. It's the perfect mix of practicality and inspiration. 

One idea expressed in the book (I think more than once) that I don't necessarily agree with though, is that there's no such thing as a good first draft...that it doesn't matter how good a writer is, their first draft is always basically rubbish. Some very famous and successful writers have said that their first drafts are always crap, which seems to confirm this idea.  

I've never really believed that much in the drafting process. Writing is, in some ways, like a performance. You prepare and make notes, and then, when you're ready to write, you want to make it good as you write it. There's something wrong if your first draft is rubbish. If you think it's rubbish, why did you write it? 

The editors of Telling True Stories are very definite about it: "No one, not even the greatest writers, creates good first drafts....[the] promising elements will reveal themselves as the writer begins to tease apart the mess with the next draft and the one after that...Good writing is far too complex to get right in one draft or two or five." (page 97) 

Another thing to consider is that technology now enables us to redraft and edit as we go, in a way that writers 40 years ago couldn't. If I'm not happy about something I just wrote, I don't need to think - OK, I'll fix that in the next draft. I can fix it now. I can also write out a plan or ideas about the structure as I go, and then write accordingly. If I think of a great way to express an idea that is going to come later, I can start writing it, and then it's there to redraft when I get to it. 

It's not the idea that editing is necessary that I object to, or even the idea that earlier drafts may not be that great, it's the absoluteness of the statement - the suggestion that there's no such thing as a good first draft - that such a thing is impossible - that, as a writer, you have to work in a particular way, you have to necessarily write a bad draft first and then heavily revise it in subsequent drafts to make it good. As Anne Rice says, the great thing about writing is that there are no rules. She even says, about her own advice to writers, 'if it's not useful to you, forget it.' (see interview here.)