Show Notes
The Myth of the "Shitty First Draft" and How It's Damaging Your Writing I'm sharing why the common advice to expect your writing to be "crap" is doing serious damage to new writers. I get the sentiment behind the phrase "shitty first draft" (SFD) — a term Anne Lamott coined in her book Bird by Bird. I was a fan of the SFD for years, even referring to it in my own book, Intuitive Writing. I used to think the negative label gave me permission to write without pressure. But here's the truth: calling your work "shitty" is training you to distrust your own writing. We need to stop normalizing language that tells writers they suck before they've even started. For me, writing is about clarity, truth, impact, and storytelling, not perfection or worrying about every tiny detail of grammar. A draft is simply an unfinished piece of writing, not a bad one — it's something that hasn't been shaped yet. I share this advice constantly: writing and editing are two completely different things. Writing is about letting the words fall out quickly and from the heart. A draft is simply a starting place. Key Takeaways: Avoid using negative labels (like "crap," "terrible," or "shitty") for your writing drafts — do you want your writing to live up to those labels?
A draft, plain and simple, is an unfinished piece of writing, not "bad writing"
The only things that truly matter in a first draft: Is it true? Did it land?
Separate writing and editing: focus on quickly getting ideas from the heart out during the drafting phase, without stopping to correct as you go
"Surrendered writing" means writing without controlling, judging, or forcing; the words fall out easily because you're fully present, calm, and grounded
Timestamps 00:00 Stop Calling Your Writing "Crap" 01:21 Why the SFD Actually Hurts Writers 02:31 Clarity Over Perfection 04:37 Drafts Are Unfinished 06:03 Writing Versus Editing 06:59 Cheer the First Attempts 07:47 My 5-Step Blogging Workflow 08:25 Labels Shape Outcomes 08:58 Surrendered Writing 10:02 How to Work With Me Links from today's episode: Some of these are affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I might earn a commission Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird
My third book, Intuitive Writing
My writing community, The Intuitive Writing Studio
Ways to partner with me one-on-one on books, blogs, or online writing
Contact me for a professional editor referral
Connect with Jacqueline Fisch: Substack: Energy-First Writing
More from How Women Write
This one is a full-circle conversation for me. Amber Heinrich and I met in corporate. We were in the same practice area, both in communications, and both vegan when that was a rare thing to find in a conference room. We've both since stepped away from the corporate consulting world, and now she's written a book. Debug Yourself: Reprogram Your Mind, Body & Spirit for Well-Being is the book Amber wishes she'd had when she was burned out. After 25 years of leading people through change, her own resets stopped working. So she collected the tools that helped, built a framework (she's a consultant, of course there was a framework), and five years later, it became a book. In this episode, you'll hear: How Amber went from "executive hippie" in corporate boardrooms to coach and author, and why she rebelled against her bohemian childhood by going to business school
Joyce De Bakker has reinvented herself more times than she can count — international moves, relationship endings, a corporate career that looked successful but felt like someone else's life. In 2026, she stopped watching others succeed from the sidelines. She launched her coaching and mentoring business and gave herself a 30-day challenge: write and publish on Substack every single day — no topic list, no strategy, and no perfect plan. In this conversation, we talk about what actually happened during those 30 days — the article that took four hours (and how she kept going!), the deeply vulnerable piece that brought her the most DMs, and the moment she realized she had more to say than she ever thought possible. Joyce also opens up about growing up in a cult, learning to read as an act of rebellion, and how writing "like the Queen" — proper, performed, safe — kept her from hitting publish for years. She shares a couple of simple practices that changed everything: five minutes of breathing before writing, and the discipline of collapsing the time between finishing a piece and putting it out into the world before the inner critic could catch up. In this episode: Growing up in a cult, and what it meant to read outside its teachings
Jennifer Ciaramello is the author of Quiet Boil and founder of Quiet Boil Project, a faith-based ministry for women learning to notice the slow-building heat in their lives and step out of it. She's also a licensed aesthetician with 26 years in the beauty industry. In this episode, Jennifer shares how her book began as a box of handwritten notes. She also shares how that box sat untouched for fifteen years before COVID boredom brought her back to it. We talk about the difference between writing to process and writing to publish, why the ending was harder to write than the trauma itself, and the new moon ritual she used to release the manuscript once it was done. This was a first! In this episode: Why the box became her earliest writing tool, and how this process can work for your own memories
When Cara Chace was a teenager sitting in a Denny's with her dad, she told him, "I want to be a writer." He shot it down before she could finish her Grand Slam. How on earth would she make a living doing that? It took her 30 years to come back around. Today, she calls herself a writer. In between, Cara became a federal special agent, then the social media manager for Megadeth, and then founded a digital marketing agency. She knows how to do social media well — except it made her sick. After three years of healing, she took a two-week break over the holidays in 2025 and felt better than she had in years. The day she switched back into content calendars and platform strategy, however, her body reacted to everything she ate. That was the spark for her book The Social Media Burnout Cure, out now. In this conversation, we talk about what happens when you catch yourself composing a caption in your brain in the middle of a moment where real life is happening. Cara's answer to what to do with "caption brain" is so simple it gave me goosebumps: don't post it. Put it in a Google Doc. And that's exactly how she wrote her book — in just three months. The best parts? She did it without burning out and says that the process was the easiest thing she's ever done. You'll hear how she mined 10 years of her own blogs and talks for material she didn't know she'd already written, why she works from a "morning menu" instead of a word count or to-do list, and why she fired her first cover designer even with a deadline looming. Plus — her favorite Megadeth song and what's in her mug when she writes. You know, all the things we writers want to know. If you've ever said "If it weren't for my business, I'd never be on social media again," this one's for you. What you'll discover: Thinking in captions? Write it down instead. Every time a gold nugget bubbled up, Cara put it in a messy working Google Doc instead of an Instagram reel or story.
It's my birthday, so I'm doing something a little different. There's no guest today, just me, some gifted Tom Ford Lost Cherry perfume I just spritzed on, me, my mic, and a mascara-free, honest catch-up. You'll hear how I'm spending the day, what this year actually felt like, and the decisions I've made that I'm sharing out loud with you today. You're hearing them here first. I walked away from some things with no regrets, and even though I'm nervous, I'm saying yes to some others. And much of it is thanks to a single book that I haven't even finished yet. You'll also hear about how I started books five and six, but book seven was actually next. And I'm not writing it for my business. I'm following God's lead. Which doesn't fit neatly into any kind of book marketing funnel. If you're a woman writing something that lights you up, this one's for you. Takeaways: Choosing a path on purpose means naming what you're letting go of, not only what you're adding.