Concept
Rough draft first
Rough draft first is the explicit permission Fiore gives against perfectionism: decide before starting that the first version will be bad, write for thirty minutes without deleting, label it draft one, and edit on a different day, because creation and judgement cannot happen at the same time.
A person who edits every sentence as it is written produces three sentences an hour and abandons the page. A person who writes badly for thirty minutes and edits tomorrow produces a chapter. The difference is not talent but sequence. Fiore has people make the permission explicit, at the top of the page, because perfectionists do not believe it otherwise: draft one, ugly on purpose, placeholders allowed, to be edited on Thursday. The draft is also the cheapest way to find out what the work actually is; the shape of a chapter is invisible until a bad version of it exists. Pressfield's professional takes the sequence to its end: the work is finished when it ships, and whatever is wrong with it becomes information for the next piece rather than evidence about the maker.
A real-life example
A translator, stuck on the tone of a difficult chapter, translates it deliberately flat in one sitting with [check] marks wherever a word is wrong, and fixes the tone the next morning in an hour. The chapter that had taken a week of not starting takes two sessions.
How to use it
- 1Write 'draft one, to be edited on [day]' at the top before you begin.
- 2Thirty minutes with no deleting; placeholders in brackets for anything you do not know yet.
- 3Edit on a different day, and ship when it is good enough for its purpose.