Terry Pratchett: "Telling Yourself a Story"

"The first draft is just you telling yourself a story."

~Terry Pratchett

    I love the way this author puts it: telling yourself a story. It has a nostalgic feel about it; an almost musical tone, smooth and eloquent.
    And quite true. It sounds like a perfectly accurate way to summarize the experience of writing first drafts. Because for a lot of writers, it's the draft that no one else sees. It's the rough draft, the document where the bare bones of the story is placed just to see how it all fits together. In many different ways and by very different people, the first draft has been described as the one where we writers just write like crazy, shoveling in the main plot points without worrying about impressing others with quality (no wonder the concept of burning the first draft once the second one is complete is such a common writer's joke). The first draft is definitely something that can be exclusively for the person writing it.
    And the first draft isn't like hearing just any old story; it's the story we're creating, taking special time to build up. And that draft is full of so many firsts! It's the first time we actually flesh out the story, it's the first draft where we get to hear the characters speaking to each other, the first time we can see exactly how they act, and it's our first opportunity to find plot twists that didn't pop up in the plotting stage. With all these new discoveries and moments where we just have to make certain things up as we go along, writing the first draft is just like hearing a story for the first time, as told by oneself.
    It's definitely one of the most exciting and sentimental parts of writing a story; and Pratchett's quote here captures that concept fantastically, don't you think? Have you ever heard his quote before?