The paper doesn’t just crumple, it screams. A high-pitched, fibrous shriek as you crush your third attempt into a dense ball of failure. It feels warm in your fist, a tiny monument to wasted time. You see the ghost of the rose you tried to draw-the lopsided petals, the stem like a bent straw. It joins its two brothers in the trash can, a small pile of evidence that you just can’t get it right.

We’ve been taught to worship the finished product. We scroll through galleries of flawless paintings, read polished final novels, and admire buildings that seem to have emerged from the earth fully formed. We are spectators in a grand museum of endings, and we have no idea about the carnage of the beginnings. We don’t see the 25 canvases the artist slashed, the 15 rewrites the author despaired over, or the 35 architectural models that collapsed.

So when we sit down to create, we expect to birth a masterpiece. And when what emerges is a wonky, disproportionate, utterly terrible first draft, we treat it not as a step, but as a verdict.

The verdict is: you’re not good enough. And at least 45 percent of the time, that’s where the idea dies, right next to the crumpled rose.

Praise the Ugly Thing

The Bridge Inspector’s Truth

My friend Helen F.T. is a structural bridge inspector. Her job is to find the tiny, terrifying flaws in things that are supposed to be perfect. She spends her days suspended hundreds of feet in the air, looking for hairline fractures in steel beams that support thousands of tons of moving traffic. Her final reports are masterpieces of precision. They are clean, exact, and unambiguous. One misplaced decimal could have catastrophic consequences.

Her first drafts, however, look like a mess. They are frantic scribbles in a waterproof notebook. They are grease-pencil marks on concrete pylons. They are voice memos filled with background wind, where she’s noting things like “sector 5-gamma, possible spalling, looks… crunchy. Check again.” She told me once that the goal of her first pass isn’t accuracy, it’s capture. She’s grabbing ghosts out of the air. The ugly, messy, ‘crunchy’ notes are the most important part of her entire process. Without that initial, chaotic capture, the final, polished report couldn’t exist. It would be an empty, theoretical document.

The Price of Perfection

I’m obsessed with efficiency, I truly am. I hate wasting paint, paper, or time. Which is why I’m telling you to embrace the process that feels the most wasteful. It’s a contradiction I live with. I once spent an entire week, probably 35 hours, trying to write a single piece of code. The first version was so bloated and illogical it was laughable. I threw it out. The second was elegant but didn’t work. I threw that out, too. On and on, until the final version was just 15 lines of code that did the job perfectly.

Was the 495 lines of code I deleted a waste?

Sketching in the Sand

There’s a strange permanence to putting a mark on a clean white page. It feels… final. Like a scar. This is why people get stuck staring at a blank canvas for hours. The pressure is immense. The first mark defines everything that comes after. That’s why I find it helpful to lower the stakes to absolute zero. Use cheap paper. Use a pencil that isn’t sharpened perfectly. Use tools that feel forgiving, that whisper ‘it’s okay to mess up.’ For my own note-taking, I found that using a good erasable pen helped short-circuit that part of my brain. It’s a psychological trick, a way of telling the inner critic that nothing is set in stone just yet, that we’re still just sketching in the sand.

The Raw Material

Sometimes people misinterpret this as a license for sloppy work. It’s the opposite. The ugly first draft isn’t the end product. It is the raw material. It’s the block of marble from which you will later carve the statue. No one looks at a chunk of rock from a quarry and says, “Well, this doesn’t look like the statue of David. What a failure.” We understand it’s the beginning. You must give your own creative process the same respect. The first draft of your novel is your quarry stone. The first sketch of your painting is your lump of clay. The first prototype of your business is your messy garage workshop. It is not supposed to be beautiful.

The Memory of the Crumple

I’ve been thinking about the physics of crumpled paper lately. When you crush it, you’re creating dozens of permanent, overlapping folds in the cellulose fibers. You can smooth it out, press it under a heavy book for a week, but you can never truly make it flat again.

You can’t go back to the pristine, blank sheet.

This is why we fear the first draft. We know, intuitively, that the act of creating it will change us. It takes an idea from the frictionless realm of our imagination and gives it a clumsy, physical body. And once it’s there, on the page or the canvas, it’s real. We can’t pretend it’s perfect anymore. Its flaws are visible. But so is its existence.

Your Treasure Map

So the next time you create something ugly, something you’re ashamed of, something that looks like a kid did it-stop. Don’t throw it away. Look at it. Find one thing, one tiny square inch, that isn’t a complete disaster. A decent line. A nice color combination. An interesting turn of phrase. That’s your starting point for the second draft. Helen doesn’t discard her ‘crunchy’ notes; she investigates them. That’s her job. And it’s your job, too. Your terrible first draft isn’t a sign to stop.