Good Advice on Frist Drafts!
From Warren Ellis's Orbital Operations email newsletter:
[T]he first draft was to 1) get it down 2) let it be bad. Seriously, just shaking my head as I wrote it muttering “this is absolute crap.” No-one’s going to see this draft but me. It is not finished work. The goal was to get to the end of one episode, any which way, and then give the draft a few days to cool down before I go back in, with fresh eyes, to fix it up.
There’s a thing, particularly if you come from commercial comics, where you have to learn to not treat your first draft as a final draft. Let the first draft be bad but filled with every thought you’ve had about the piece.
This makes sense to me because I always have a hard time writing the first draft. The biggest thing that gets in the way is imagining other people reading it and being repulsed by the words I've strung together. The first draft takes me forever to complete, and I usually end up not finishing it because so much time goes by, and I still don't have something I'd feel comfortable showing to other people.
When I have written stuff under the pressure of a deadline, I've been able to do what Ellis suggests. I get something down and revise the shit out of it later.
(Side note: For me, revision takes longer than writing. The thing is, if there is nothing to revise, then nothing gets finished.)