"...and the draft horse you rode in on."

Tackling self doubt, motivation voids, and procrastination stations: first drafts are hard

Jun 26, 2024

I am horse. Draft horse. I draft the draft.

Walk on!

Head down with hooves that blur, pedaling against the invisible obstruction that has—until now—used its full chest to keep me from completing my mission. From even starting my mission: my work in this fallow field.

In this moment I greet my purposeful toil, pausing at the entryway—the gate to this field—to salute my odyssey. I survey the scene before me.

Between this gate IN and that gate OUT there is a whole field to plow. A story to be written. A hero’s journey to be had.

A roughed in draft etched into the earth by a rough and ready draft horse.

Steady now. Tch-tch!

My heart surges in anticipation of what’s to come. The heat of it, a blaze beneath my coat that ripples and fits with impulse hot and ancient, aware and alive. I am excited by the prospect of this empty field, this untouched ground and its never drawn patterns. Giddy with it.

What will you reveal to me? Giddy up!

Snorting and heaving and inhaling the odor of this rich soil, this dirt of my imagination, I pause. What? What? What? There is the sod and straw and mystery of a life unwritten. The promise of what could be if I angle the blade correctly to till and turn and plow the absolute raw and ugly, unpolished power from this very field.

This field of me.

Stomping, scratching, I paw at the ground, urging the inhabitants—earthworm, cricket, snail, and slug. Small rodents in their burrows—to awaken from their slumber. Announcing with the heavy thud of anxious feet that I have arrived. That I am here.

Digest your words, magnificent creatures of this natural and undiscovered country. Process your thoughts, your plot twists and quickly now, so that I may uncover them with a turn of my blade. My trusty plowshare. My tool.

Watch me enter. Watch me step into the field.

We are beginning.

I am draft horse. I am drafting the draft.

Attaching blinkers to narrow my field of vision—my focus—I shake my head against the reigns of it. The plow behind dips its greased tongue into the soft soil and pliant grass to shuck whole sentences from the earth. Behind the plow, a docile and distracted human looks on. Frightened. Conflicted. Curious.

She is me too, but she is not a draft horse. She is a draft dodger. Has been for many years. She is a “look over here and go do the laundry and let’s read a book and isn’t there a shortcut?” seeker, and for this to work, she must be tied to the plow. She must be pulled along with us. With me. Her draft horse.

I am the manifestation of her want to do but don’t know where to start. And so, I go.

Walk on!

Procrastination vultures still circle her skull. Distraction dragons shoot fire at her path, but I continue to pull. She must hold on—it is her only job. Put her hand to the handle and tether her wrist.

I will pull us all. I am pulling. I will pull until the task is completed. There will be no look backs, no stopping, no inspections, no polish with the rag she keeps in her pocket.

The rawness of the first draft is indicative of its power.

And we are hunting the raw.

No set plow patterns here. Nothing will be straight or perfect or clean or pasteurized or sterilized or fertilized. This is about turning organic earth. Turning it over. This is about exposing the glistening bodies of word worms, fat and ripe for the beaks of my bird—the human there, dragged kicking and screaming, behind.

I am not bird. Not yet. I am horse. I am draft horse. Forward. Go. Only go.

I pull. Furrow after furrow, I plow the field. I urge the blade and strike the stone and negotiate the obstacle. I pull.

Draft the draft, draft horse. There is no precision plow. Save that for later. Turn the crust and reveal the filth and mess and grime and dust and let’s will the very guts of it—the contents of its characters—into existence.

Work the land. Shape it steady and firm into a form of undermined size and scope, with rows yet to be counted. First that draft. First that draft into the field of finished with determination and grit.

The roughness of the row is indicative of its potential.

There is hunger here—a rich flavor to be savored in the edit—but not yet. There can be no counting until the field is plowed. There can be no fixing until we’ve broken all the ground. Until we’ve made the disaster. Revealed the raw. The great grand mess of it.

I am horse. Draft horse. As I continue in my labor, the words I unearth seem confused and vulnerable, roused from their dormant comfort with a sense of rude urgency.

Revealed. Exposed. Naked. The harness digs into my shoulders as I pull the components of my revelation—the plow, the plot, the story, and all the characters in their confused reverie—to the surface to meet.

I hear the chatter of them behind me, but I do not look back. I cannot look over this field until the entire surface has been turned over and the bones and blood and flesh of it revealed.

Do not look back.

I am horse. Draft horse. I pull. I do not leave the field until the field is finished.

This is the soil of chapter and sentence and structure and done. These are the drabbles and fragments of useless things that rise to the surface only to be buried again in the edit. Later, later, later.

I am a force field; I am forcing the field to yield. I cut and slice, row by row, word by word.

Roots and rocks and ancient minerals with their dirty secrets lay grubby fingers to the metal, tinging and surging and mugging and protesting my progress. Seeking attention to halt the show, they talk of bodies buried and murder and treasure and jewels but only, only if I stop drafting and start looking. Only if I stop and look and go back and make the crooked straight and hey, why not quit this start altogether?

Now.

Before the draftin’s done.

Procrastination, distraction, the taunting of this horse with the promise of easy times and constant nothing if I stable this drafting animal. Put it back in the barn. Go do something else.

This animal is me. I do not like this development. This sudden yearning to ditch the draft while in the draft. To quit unfinished, like the time before and the time before that.

With naysayers saying neigh in my ear.

No!

I surge toward another row. I square my shoulders and reenergize my spirit and go and go and go. One more row. One more sentence. I cannot be stopped.

“Screw your optimism,” sayeth the naysayer saying neigh. “Screw you and the draft horse you rode in on.”

I laugh. Fear is a voice with its tide receding.

So many unfinished drafts in my past. So many times I’ve yielded to the naysayer within, leaving half-plowed fields peppered with holes—the ankle-breakers of beginnings.

Not this time.

I am draft horse and there is only the draft. That is the mission, the task, the assignment, the work of it. I will plow some kind of magic from this fertile mush, tickling minerals and sediments and soaks planting wild iris bulbs to burst forth in the spring of my success. Finding beauty amongst the ugliness. Exposing soil secrets and secretions.

To strike at the keyboard thick with bramble, to scribble on clay, to chip into stone. To ignore hard ground and embrace hard scrabble. To accept the suck of the bog and scrape of the clod. To pull and heave and keep going with the struggle. That’s all there is. Row after row. ‘Round and ‘round. On and on until the draft work of this draft horse is done.

A story—this story—has been allocated a plot of land. It has a gate of entry and a gate of exit. The job is simple: find a way through the plot. Enter via one gate, exit via another, interpret chaos along the way. Lean into the collar, keep the traces light, pull that plow from one gate to the other with wild in between, drifting in and out of creative consciousness. Drive the plow until the work is done.

This is the first draft horse odyssey.

I am draft horse, tractor horse, word machine, and beast. Hard and determined, pulling corner to corner, edge to edge, with the curl of my furrow as an eyelid to my vision.

The vision gets clearer the more I plow.

They say: “Never use a cow in your neighbor’s field as a marker reference.”1

Plow-talk with double meaning. I draft the draft. This draft is my draft. I do not look to the fields of others. I do not compare progress. I do not use their success as an excuse to quit, nor use it as a stick to beat myself with. I pick a point in my fresh and private field and pull my word count toward it this day, another day, and all the days ‘til done.

The roughness of the plowed field—the rawness of the earth, the bits and bobs and exposed bodies and wriggling worms and ugly half dead thoughts, the sheer untreated untouched unfertilized crudeness of it—is indicative of its richness.

The rawness of the first draft is indicative of its power.

Without a first, there can be no second, so pull, draft horse.

Pull.

Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇

Behind the Streams, Ep. 55: "Draft"

Janeen McCrae

Jul 3

Read full story

This week’s amends…

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
―Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

On Rotation: “Houseplants” by Squid

The Stream On Rotation Playlist

Yes, I love David Lynch. And I also love these kinds of projects. They’re re-releasing all 120 episodes this summer on the official channel in honor of the 15th year anniversary. Looking forward to seeing these in high def.