Treating Your Words Gently - The "Vomit" Draft

My second episode with the new mic and my first episode having been to therapy! I think it's a noticeable change on both fronts, so I hope you're encouraged through listening to this episode as much as I am and keep listening for more. 

Transcript

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy. Also writing is Jennifer K Lambert, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Oh. It's so good. It's so good this morning. Today is. Say it with me, people. It is Friday, December 12th, 2025. 12/12/25 Feels like it's got some kind of numerical magic to it.
You tell me. I'm actually feeling good today. Which is nice. I feel like I haven't been feeling good for a long time. I went to therapy yesterday. And I really liked this gal, and she already, gave me one really useful insight that's being helpful for me. And also, it was kind of nice just to, tell her everything that's been happening the last few years and have her be kind of appalled and saying, well, that's a lot.
Yes. This has been really hard. I've been going through just one thing after another.
And, and she was she was great. She went through a lot of the, like the early childhood stuff with me. So some of you's that have done more therapy than I have, which is practically none. You know, like the A's. She asked me if I knew what the something A's were or. Anyway, she was, you know, like, had I witnessed domestic violence or, you know, like, sexual assault or all of these kinds of things.
And it was also kind of nice to be able to say, you know, hey, I, you know, I've, I've had a really nice life that way. I have not endured a lot of those kinds of traumas and had a very solid childhood and, oh, a wonderful mother. It's just, Yeah, that what I have right now is just this sort of, concentration of traumas.
She was pointing out that when my stepdad Dave died in March of 2024, and I was resuscitating him for - Not resuscitating him, ATTEMPTING to resuscitate him with 911 on the speakerphone, calling out the numbers. You know, she said, well, that's a terribly traumatic experience right there. And I was like, yeah, you know, it was. And I don't think I ever processed it right.
There just wasn't time and there wasn't the, I don't know, the room for me to do that. Yeah, I she really already gave me insights. She gave me homework. And I think I immediately perceived that I'm the sort of person who takes homework very, very seriously and will want an A+ on my homework. And she's like, no, it's not actually real homework.
I did mention at one point what she asked if I'd ever struggled with anxiety or depression, and I said no. There is some in the family my aunt has suffered from it. And I said, but, you know, I do have that perfectionist tendency that she feels like has really led to her anxiety and depression. And I have been battling that since I was very young.
And I would say that this is as an aside, but everything here at First Cup of Coffee is an aside. We get to talk about my mental health. Hooray! I think I want to emphasize right there that my friends have been nagging me to get therapy for a long time, and that, they were right. It has already made such a huge difference just to, you know, like, talk about what's going on and get the some tools, some insights.
But, I was thinking about the perfectionists because, you know, I was I was a smart girl, right? I was, you know, gifted and talented. And I count that as one of the ways that my child was hood was really great because I was in this great progressive school district, and the teachers were wonderful and they got me into all of these kinds of programs.
And that really helped me learn and grow, in ways that I still value today. But yeah, I always did have this perfectionist tendency, right? Like in school, my nickname was the brain. Right? That's what the other kids called me. That tells you everything right there. No, I was not flattered by it. Because in high school, you don't want to be the brain, right?
You want to be the head cheerleader if you're a girl. Now, I appreciate it, but I remember being a little girl and Girl Scouts at camp and camping out overnight and looking at the stars and telling the other little girls, what the constellations were naming them. And I had no idea where I learned that. I mean, I probably saw it in a book or at some sort of ranger guided tour with my parents somewhere.
But like, I knew the names of all the constellations and could pick them out. And that was how I had understood everything, that I, you know, just absorbed these things effortlessly through osmosis, you know, the the knowledge of the world just flowed through my pores and ended up in my brain. And it was a great way to learn things.
So when I got to the point in my education where I actually had to apply diligent effort of some variety to learn, it was math analysis in junior year of high school, and I reconciled myself to getting a b o gasp in horror and math analysis because it deliberately allowed me to take that pressure off. Another alternative would have been for me to actually study and learn the math, but that wasn't going to happen.
Not yet. That happened when I went to college. When I found out that I had to learn how to study and I had to apply myself how to, you know, like, sit down and learn the stuff on the books. I took calculus, freshman year of college and made myself learn this stinking stuff, which all sounds like champagne problems, right?
But it it it was this thing about, getting away from the perfectionism, and it's relevant. It's actually relevant to the putative topic of this podcast as opposed to just being me rambling on over coffee, which we all know it really is.
Is that perfectionism gets in the way of writing too. And I think we all know this, especially with the being unable to turn off editor brain. And that's one reason why many authors advise some form of fast drafting or, I mean, some people say vomit draft, and I really hate that because I think words matter and I don't like calling my work half digested food.
That's been reintroduced to the world in an unfortunate, stinky, and unpleasant way. That's not how I view my words now. I know, like Jennifer Estep, she loves to call it the vomit draft because that gives her permission to view it as, I don't know, not important. You know that she can she can accept that it's ugly.
I've heard other people call it ugly drafting or that sort of thing. But the whole point, the whole purpose of fast drafting, of not editing as you go, is to get past that perfectionism. I had one writer friend very early on who would write sentence by sentence, and she would labor over every single sentence, and she wrote beautifully.
I mean, she had gorgeous, gorgeous prose, but it took her forever to write anything at all. And it's it's not that there's anything wrong with that. You can do that if that's what matters to you and that's what mattered to her, then do that. But, you know, poets do that, right? There's there's different forms of writing that you work on in different ways that you write in different ways.
And poetry is something where you labor over every single word choice and placement and punctuation and spacing. When you're writing novels, when you're writing something that is 80,000-100,000 words long, right? You can write that way. You can labor over every single sentence. And I think there are writers who do. Ted Chang writes a novel every ten years.
He has another job, too. That's his process. That's what he writes. She writes gorgeous books. Donna Tartt writes one book like every 10 or 20 years. There are people who do this. It depends on what you're trying to do, right? I always come back around to this and advice writing advice on the podcast is that you have to know what you want.
You you have to decide what kind of writer do you want to be if you want to be the kind of writer that pays the bills, what's writing? You basically have two choices. You can either become a phenomenon and get rich and very well-established. With your early books. We'll call it the J.K. Rowling method. I kind of hate.
I kind of hate that. That's what happened, right? First Harry Potter book hit big, and she didn't have to worry about money after that. Right. But you can't plan that. You can't make that happen. The other way to do it is to be a workhorse writer, to write a lot of books very steadily. Now, we could point to someone like George R.R. Martin, right?
And we could say, oh, well, you know, George has plenty of money. He doesn't have to worry about money now. He makes tons of money from his books, but he didn't for 20 or 30 years that he was writing. I've told this story before, but it's well worth telling that my friend Melinda Snodgrass, who has been very good friends with George for a long time, said that they were having a game night doing role playing games.
A group of them had played this game all night and crashed at somebody's house, and so she was in the kitchen and George rolled in the next morning, you know, tired and probably a little bit hungover, maybe just from getting playing. And he said, there's got to be a way to make something that we can sell from doing this.
Right. Because none of them had money. They were all poor writers. And, and then when George wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, I guess the first book was called Game of Thrones, right? It took off. It hit again. Not something you can program or plan. There are other writers out there who are in varying stages of this.
Right. But the whole point, my entire point and I do have one, is that you have to write the book first. Okay. And if you are writing a novel, what you have to have to have to do or anything long form is you have to get those words on the page and the whole concept of writer's block, I personally think, is anxiety and depression getting in the way and perfectionism.
I don't think it's a separate thing from that. So when people ask me about writer's block, I always say that I don't have it. I have some days where, yeah, the writing goes much more slowly than there is some weeks and years when the writing goes more slowly than others. Depression, anxiety are monsters that block creativity. They get in between you and putting the words on the page.
And that's why whatever you can do to get those words down, to get them out and onto the page. So if it's voice dictation or if it's just writing nonsense until it starts to turn into sense, and then you go back and edit and then your editor brain has something to do, but your editor brain will not help you put words on the page.
That's just, the editor brain is worthless for that, unfortunately, and not only worthless actively gets in the way of it actively stops you from creating. And that's not what we want. We want to get those words down, get them out. And, you know, I try to treat them gently, right. You know, I don't like to call them vomit or ugly or scrambled or anything like that.
I, you know, they're they're baby words. I often use the metaphor of, like, shaken baby syndrome. Right. When you write something very new, when it's very young and fresh out into the world, that you don't want to treat it roughly, you must treat it very, very gently or you're going to injure it, right. So this is the advice you did not ask for, although presumably you're listening for reasons beyond wondering how, I'm doing with my mental health.
Is get those words out. Treat them very, very gently. Banish the editor brain. Don't worry about if it's right or wrong, or if it's working, or if it's not, or if it's the right word. I do something that many writers do when I'm writing. If I can't think of the word I want in exactly that moment, I just put square brackets around it.
Just use whatever word seems like it'll just sit there or I'll just blank, you know, put in excellent square brackets. And then I search for the square brackets later. And very often when I come back, either the word that I bracketed that I thought was the totally wrong word is fine, or sometimes it's very obvious to me like what word it should be.
There are all of these ways, these tricks to work with ourselves. And I think that that's probably something that we learn in dealing with, like my mom's dementia or with other kinds of mental health, is we think that we are in control of our minds. We think that we are in control of our emotions and what they do.
And we have this idea that because we think, I think, therefore I am right, I therefore I am cognizant and knowing everything. And a lot of times we're not. A lot of times we are, not in control and our brains are doing the equivalent of having a heart attack. Right. And I think we have to be very gentle with ourselves, dealing with that.
So on that note, I'm going to try to get some writing done today. My mom did settle into assisted living yesterday. It's going all right. She's not happy. But, she's liking it better so far than I thought. And then we'll just see what next steps are. I'm very hopeful that she will be very happy there and get that settled.
So, it would be a Christmas miracle. Alas. Anyway, I'm feeling fairly energized. The Magic Reborn is coming along. I've got, like, 17,000 words to go. I'm hoping it will go fast. Let's knock on wood. But I'm just, like, all in the finishing chapters. And so generally, those go pretty fast. So let's hope.
And, I will talk to you all on Tuesday. You all take care. Bye bye.