Please Write Badly - Zero Drafts and Story Dust
In a previous article, "Just Write" Is Terrible Advice, I explored unlocking your writing potential through overcoming the fear of writing something imperfect. Writing is a process each time a new story idea is laid out. The first step is to just get it all out so you can clean it up later, every time. Not a single veteran author is out there skipping drafts.
Now I want to explore the power of words when it comes to the popular terms that inspire us to draft.
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The Modern Concept of the "Zero Draft"
I zero draft a lot. It's stream of consciousness writing that thrives on momentum, random thoughts in brackets, and chaining your inner editor to the wall before you start. I first heard this term in a Medium article by Rachael Arsenault called "What is a Zero Draft, And Why Should You Use One?" (2024), but let's figure out where "zero draft" originated.
Joan Bolker, author of Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day (1998), explicitly credits Lois Bouchard for the term:
"I first heard about zero drafts from Lois Bouchard, a talented writer and teacher of writing."
Bolker goes on to describe the zero draft as "the point where the writing project begins to take shape", somewhere between "pure chaos and the first draft", and admits that it "may not actually exist as a formal draft."
It's odd to me that the term "zero draft" never really took off in the mainstream. Instead it manifested again and again, going by a lot of different names. It has been worked into famous writers' frameworks, like Anne Lamott's term - "shitty first draft" - in her book "Bird by Bird" (1994). She wrote:
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something - anything - down on paper."
Her framework is a little bit more encouraging in its terminology than her initial phrasing. It includes down draft (get it down), up draft (fix it up), and "dental draft" (check every tooth).
Other proponents of zero-draft style writing are Natalie Goldberg (author of Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life), Steven Pressfield (author of The War of Art), Calvin Trillin (coined the "vomit out" draft idea), and Austin Kleon (blogger that popularized Anne Lamott's concepts online).
S.J. Watson wrote on Reedsy that he uses the term "draft zero" because calling it that "tricks my brain into believing that this stuff doesn't matter."
In a Poynter Institute article written by Roy Peter Clark (2018), Roy wrote that no one strongly stakes a claim to the zero draft the way Lamott does with "shitty first drafts" or Calvin Trillin does with the "vomit out" draft. He coined his own riff called "sub-zero drafting", which comes before the zero draft. It's the idea that even a napkin sketch counts as pre-writing.
It seems like even when it's the premise of the whole framework or article, zero draft gets flop-flipped, passed over for another process, or renamed.
I Like Zero Drafting Better Than Shit, Vomit, and Writing on Napkins
In Brevity Magazine (2025), Deborah Carr pushed back on the "shitty" terminology in Lamott's framework and argued that it was demeaning; the spirit of Lamott's message is a good one that has been "muddled" by the phrasing that she gives to it.
I agree. Again, I don't know what happened to zero draft. It's clean, crisp, and it gives the clear idea that it's something less comprehensible than a first draft. It gives you perfect permission to make a mess and straighten up later.
I'm a firm believer that words have power and calling your writing "shit" or "vomit" from the get-go can be a motivation killer whether it's a conscious reaction or not. I'm guilty of doing this too. In my previous article I wrote:
"...Your first draft is going to be an unpublishable mess, and creating such hot trash feels wrong...What we should really be taught is how to create a pile of garbage and sort through it. We should be taught to practice AND that practice is ugly."
Hot Trash. Garbage. Ugly.
Not really any inspiring vocabulary there.
That's why I'm writing this, because I came across some new ideas that I believe writers should embrace when it comes to the process. Words have power and the unconscious mind drives us more than we'd like to admit. Putting a positive spin on a frustrating process can change the whole trajectory.
So allow me to introduce...
The Discovery Draft and Story Dust
Emma Darwin has her own Substack called "This Itch of Writing". In her article "What is a Zero Draft?" (2024) she wrote:
"Calling it a 'zero draft' classes it as 'discovery writing,' which removes the pressure to make this look as like a final draft as you can manage."
She goes on to frame the zero draft as its own stage that writers naturally gravitate towards even though a lot of them can't name it:
"There clearly is a stage for many writers which comes later than the thinking-out we call planning, but earlier than the drafting-prose-for-editing."
So without officially coining it, Emma turned me onto the idea that the zero draft can also be called the discovery draft. I attribute it to her.
The discovery draft is what you write before the first draft. The phase when you are discovering the story for yourself based on the ideas in your head. It's an adventure, it's fun, and it's made of "story dust".
As much as I detest the idea of including yet another step in the writing process, Roy Peter Clark wrote that the sub-zero draft was a prebeginning; not a story, but story dust.
Story dust is the most phenomenal framing I've ever heard when it comes to the story fragments that end up within a writer's drafts, and I think it should be more popular than it is.
Words Have Power
Zero draft is a neutral term, I'd say. But discovery draft and story dust give both positive reinforcement and subconscious permission to bypass any editing. They tell the writer to go on an adventure and get it all written down. Just like "just write" isn't specific enough, "just write badly" isn't positive enough, even if it is a catchy title. I think it's important to encourage young and new writers with a positive mindset, terminology included.
Resources
Lois Bouchard origin, per Bolker | http://courses.washington.edu/rdesign/Bolker%201998.pdf (via punkrockor.com/2025/01/22/writing-the-first-draft-and-the-zero-draft)
Bolker's zero draft description | https://punkrockor.com/2025/01/22/writing-the-first-draft-and-the-zero-draft
Darwin's "discovery writing" and stage quote | https://emmadarwin.substack.com/p/what-is-a-zero-draft
Clark, "sub-zero draft" and "story dust" | https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2018/before-the-%C2%91zero-draft%C2%92-comes-the-%C2%91sub-zero-draft%C2%92-%C2%97-even-a-napkin-will-do
Lamott's "shitty first draft" and draft sequence | https://austinkleon.com/2018/04/30/first-drafts
S.J. Watson's "draft zero" brain trick | https://reedsy.com/live/draft-zero-sj-watson
Carr's pushback on "shitty" terminology | https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/08/21/birdbybird
What is a Zero Draft, And Why Should You Use One? | https://medium.com/@rachaellawrites/what-is-a-zero-draft-and-why-should-you-use-one-482a61bb82d6
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