drafts as invitations

One way to quiet your perfectionism is to look at your first draft as an invitation. When you share that draft with someone you create a shared experience. You have built a bridge between your consciousness and someone else’s. There’s a thing in the world now, a thing that exists, that you and your reader can look at together.

When you share your draft, you invite your reader to walk across that bridge, to show up, to look at something with you. You ask someone to join you for the amount of time it takes to read your draft.

Sharing your draft is like inviting someone to quickly chat or to look out the window right next to you. If it’s a long draft, maybe it’s like inviting them to walk a couple miles on a route you have recently walked, or to try a restaurant you find interesting, at the least.

This is a lovely instance of two people being human. It’s also low stakes.

For the introverts reading this, invitations may feel high stakes by default. Don’t forget - a cool, even miraculous, aspect of this kind of invitation is you don’t have to be there with the person when they accept it and act on it.

-eric