I once worked with a writer who showed me his first drafts. They were terrible. Rambling. Unfocused. Full of clichés and half-formed thoughts.
"Why are you showing me this?" I asked.
"Because this is how good ideas start," he said. "Bad first."
He was right.
Every writer I respect writes badly at first. They let the words pour out, unedited, unfiltered. Then they shape them. Carve them. Cut them. The first draft isn't the work. It's the raw material for the work.
But most writers don't work this way. They try to write perfectly from sentence one. They agonize over the first paragraph. They polish as they go. The result? They never finish. Or they finish with something technically correct but emotionally dead.
Because perfectionism in drafting is paralysis. It stops the flow. It makes you editor and creator simultaneously, and those are incompatible modes.
Anne Lamott calls them "shitty first drafts." Hemingway said "The first draft of anything is shit." Neither of them meant lower your standards. They meant separate creation from criticism.
Create messy. Edit ruthlessly. But don't try to do both at once.
If you're stuck, stop trying to write well. Write badly. Write wrong. Write with confidence that you'll fix it later. Because you will. But first, you have to write it.