There are no second drafts
The moment is here, the moment is gone, the experience is ephemeral.
Shortly after I started this newsletter, a reader told me that it always felt like a first draft. And, to be honest, it usually is: I sit down, I open the app, I write, and I schedule. There’s some deleting and reworking here and there—on a sentence by sentence basis—but I do not write a piece, let it sit, review it, and rewrite it. The article that you get in your email or on the Substack app is, more or less, the unpolished first draft.
So let’s talk about first drafts.
Randy Feltface is a puppet comedian. More accurately, he is the puppet that comedian Heath McIvor uses in his act, but the conceit of the act is that Randy is the only comedian on stage: he lives the life, writes the material, and performs the act.
It’s weird. Just stay with me.
The set up of one of his specials is that Randy has written a book and is giving his first public reading of it, but he’s too scared of what people will actually think of his work, so he keeps telling other stories and avoiding reading the book that he is supposedly there to read.
And one of the stories that he tells is about buying a bookshelf on Gumtree.
It is a bonkers story. It twists and turns with abandon. And if you have about twenty minutes, I highly recommend that you go watch it before I spoil it for you. And, just so you know, and just so you’re ready, there are swears.
And here’s a button, just to take up some space, so that I don’t spoil it for you if you’re going to watch it before you keep reading:
Okay. Ready?
The conceit of the story is that it is a true story. The second-to-last twist is that it is entirely made up. And the final twist is that it is the first draft. Here’s the story, as it didn’t happen, one shot.
Of course, it is not a first draft, it is part of an act and it has been honed over time. An idea became a story, the story became a bit, the bit was performed in clubs, laughs were noted, things were changed, it was performed again, more notes were made, and so on. There was a journey from the idea that Heath McIvor had to the story that Randy tells in that special.
But the conceit of the final twist is that it is a first draft.
And when I rewatched it recently, it got me thinking about how much of our lives are first drafts. Most of what we do and say is the first draft.
A while ago, I started preaching without a manuscript. Later, I started making videos without a script. And, of course, I write these articles without a script; at least, I write them without a set of revisions.
I think about things beforehand, of course—I have bits and pieces arranged in my mind—but a fair amount of my professional production is, more or less, first drafts.
Even when I repeat a sermon, it’s two first drafts of the same sermon.
Over my sabbatical, I provided pulpit supply for another church, and the text for the day happened to be one that I had preached on not too long earlier in my own congregation. So, I delivered the same sermon. But really, it was not the same sermon. It followed the same outline, it had some of the same bits, it had the same overarching message. But, when you get down to it, it was the same idea given new life as the first draft of a second sermon.
Every sermon is a first draft, even if it’s a first draft twice.
There are two points that I want to leave you with:
The first is that life is a series of moments that will never be repeated. Even if you’re reading the final draft of something, or watching a carefully crafted and edited performance, the moment in which you are doing that is ephemeral. Appreciate it.
The second is that we are constantly presenting our first drafts to other people: the first drafts of meeting people, the first drafts of hard truths, the first drafts of easy loves, the first drafts of final goodbyes. Every so often, we might have a really good first draft, but at least as often—and probably more often—those first drafts are just the best we can do in the moment. So have grace for your first drafts. And have grace for other people’s first drafts.
Because the moment is here, the moment is gone, the experience is ephemeral. And the next first draft might be better.