I was chatting to my writing friend Anne about first drafts.

We both agreed: they are hard.

Not just a bit tiring hard. They are a beast of a thing.

It feels a little like giving birth to some strange creature that you don’t entirely recognise. You have spent all this time creating it, feeding it, carrying it around inside you — and then suddenly there it is, sitting on the page.

And you’re supposed to tend to it.

Feed it. Shape it. Clean it up. Work out what it is trying to become.

Except you’re absolutely spent.

I wonder sometimes whether this is a skill to learn or simply one of those universal truths of making something.

Perhaps you do get better at first drafts. You learn not to edit while you’re creating. You learn to tolerate the mess. You learn that the thing doesn’t have to make sense yet.

But I don’t think you ever completely eliminate the beast.

Because the strange thing is, despite how exhausting it is, I keep coming back.

There is something deeply satisfying about writing.

I don’t always know what I’m trying to say when I begin. Sometimes I don’t even know that I have something to say. But somewhere underneath the thinking and the typing and the wrestling with words, something is asking to be expressed.

And when I give it somewhere to go, something inside me becomes quieter.

Perhaps that’s the other beast.

The one that lives inside us writers.

The restless one. The one that keeps nudging, wondering, noticing, connecting things, asking questions. The one that doesn’t seem particularly interested in whether it’s convenient.

Writing doesn’t necessarily tame that beast.

But it soothes it.

And maybe that’s why we put ourselves through the first one.

We give birth to the beast on the page so that the beast inside us can breathe.

I give birth to this strange creature, I’m exhausted by it, and somehow I love it enough to do it all over again.