Episode 20 - Your work in progress isn’t shitty; it’s just unfinished

In this episode, I share how viewing your WIP as “unfinished” instead of “shitty” will be immensily helpful by using the comparaison of building a house. It’s a conversation I had with many of my writer friends that has helped them a lot and I’m sure it will benefit you too! I also talk about why I decided not to submit my old short stories anymore.

Mentioned in this episode:

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• Subscribe to my newsletter
• The Story Grid Methodology
• https://cecilialyra.com
• https://www.theshitaboutwriting.com
• Email me at info@leftieaube.com

Recorded on June 1st, 2026

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Transcript

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Welcome to Leftyobe's Writing Podcast where I share with vulnerability and positivity my journey towards making all of my writing dreams come true. I hope you learn with me as I go from the things that go well and what doesn't go so well. But mainly I wish it inspires you to pursue your own writing dreams. Now let's begin. Hello and welcome to Lefty Obeys Writing Podcast. I'm so glad that you're here today. If you've been following the podcast for some time now, you may have seen that there was a little gap in the posting. And it's not because I'm going back to the super irregular postings. It's just because you know life happened, there was some holidays, and then family life really got crazy. So I decided to pick a stay back, refocus my energy the little time I had, put it at the right place, and that turned out to be my novel, my writing, my art, knowing that I would come back when the timing would be right. And this was it. Today I woke up and I was like, I want to do the podcast today. I really felt called to it. We'll see, but I think you will be able to see this on video on Apple Podcasts. You can go and check right now, maybe it's already available by the time this episode is posted. But I've been working on making this available because this podcast admin video for quite a few episodes right now, and it was on Spotify, but the majority of my listenership is on Apple Podcasts, so the videos weren't really viewed, and I haven't figured out YouTube yet. We'll sort this out in time, but at least Apple Podcasts would be available. So this is really fun to me. So if you'd like to see me instead of just hearing me, the option is or will be available soon. As of the reason why I've been away in the entire notion of going back to the art first, this is going to be the topic of my future newsletter, which I will send maybe this week, maybe next week, I don't know. But on my newsletter, I send exclusive content that I don't share on social media that I don't share here on this podcast. It's solely for the newsletter. If you want to read what it's all about and where my reflection came from with taking a break from the podcast during the crazy times, you can go and subscribe to the newsletter right now. There's a link in the show notes, and you will be able to know what happened. And also in the show notes, you can find the link to the Ko-Fi for the podcast. So if you enjoy the podcast and you want to support it, you want to help me to cover the cost of the podcast, which would be so appreciated. You can go on the Ko-Fi, you can either give a one-time donation or become a member or subscriber to the podcast. There is few options available of perks and things that you can get in exchange of being a Ko-Fi member. Yeah, I think that's how they call them. So you can go there and check that out. The link again will be in the show notes. Before I go into the topic part of the episode, which will be it's not shitty, it's just unfinished. And I wanted to talk about this because this is discussion I've been having with my friends, my writer friends lately. It's something that comes back all the time, and it's also something I have to remind myself constantly, especially right now that I'm in the editing phase, and some things look really good and other things really don't look good, and it's something I have to keep reminding myself. And it had been in the lineup for the podcast for some time, but this morning I was like, no, this is the time to talk about this, because I really believe it's something that will be valuable to any writers at any stage, it's something we always need to remember. It's not shitty, it's just unfinished. So this will be in the topic part of the episode, but first, here's my update. So I've been working on my novel, even though I've been posting less on social media and haven't been so much present here with the podcast or even in my newsletter. It's because I was focusing the little time I had on my novel. It's my priority. I decided to make a first draft pass, making the big changes that I know I need to do according to the story grid methodology in my scene. So I've written a first draft, my agent read it along with some trusted better readers who I'm so grateful to have. They are my friends and they are amazing. And they read my novel, they gave me feedback, and now I'm going back, I'm analyzing every scene according to the story grid methodology, and then I'm applying the change. So at first, I wanted to just analyze and make notes about the change, and then do all the changes. So the story grid changes, the changes that my better reader suggested, and the line editing, I wanted to do it all in one go, all in one draft past, but it turned out to just be too much. I think I could already see that it would be a too big a draft pass to address everything in just one go. So I decided for this current draft pass, I'm applying the story grid in analyzing the story with the story grid. I'm making a plan and I'm acting on the plan, including also everything my better readers mentioned. So I've been going back, I've edited the scenes that I hadn't made notes with the story grid, with the changes for my better readers, and I hit a big wall. It was my third scene, it was the fourth scene of the novel, because there was a prologue, so the first third of the real scenes, if you want, and it was the introduction to my second POV character, so it was a bit like the first scene in some ways, because the reader needs to attach to this POV as my first POV, so I really needed to hit this scene, and I just couldn't make it, and it took me three weeks to manage to make a plan for this scene and then apply the plan. I'm going to go deeper into this in the next episode, I think. I'll see how I feel about it all then. But I'm going to talk about this concept of why it took me so long to finish editing this scene, and I've did it. I'm really proud of how it looks right now, and I'm so grateful that I've gotten there. But it took me a long while and it was necessary, and that's what I want to talk about. How sometimes it can seem like it's just writing a scene, but there are so many things underneath that you need to figure out before you can write the scene, and that's basically what I did. So I will go deeper into that. But I finally finished that scene, so now I'm moving on to scene four, which I hope, let's hope, uh, will be less long. I I really think it will be, and I think it will move faster from then, but it's all about going slowly, steadily, but I'm making progress, and that's important, and I'm showing up to the novel too. And sometimes that's the only thing you can do, just one bite at a time, and you're going at it. And I did the homework I talked about in last episode. So if you haven't listened to the previous episode, go listen to it. And the homework was to analyze the first POV chapter in Game of Thrones because that's done so well, and see the similarities and the pattern there to allow me to do the same thing with my story, and that proved invaluable. Like, I'm so grateful that I did this exercise. That's what allowed me to crack it because I saw that in each of those scenes there was the setting there to tell us something really precise about the character, and we couldn't have not known this element about the character if it wasn't for the setting and the setup of the scene. And also there was something happening, so the turning was a break in status quo for this character, like it happened for every character that I analyzed in the first novel, A Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire. I did that and it really, really helped, and I figured out that there was many things about the character I needed to know, etc. So I will go back another time. But I've done my own work and it proved really helpful. So I wanted to report back on this. Also, on the short story side, I've received four rejections for my short stories since the last time I recorded on two different stories, and I wrote those stories years ago, like more than five years ago. I still love them. I love them dearly. One of them got really close to being published, and the ontology didn't work out, the other one never got close, but I really love them a lot, so that's why I kept on submitting them, thinking okay, maybe this is just about finding the run magazine. But I I'm seeing that I'm getting tired of judging where I am right now in my career based on stories I wrote five years ago, and even one of those ones, it's one of the ones I wrote like 10 years ago. When I'm getting a rejection for those stories, it feels like it's a rejection of the writer that I am today, but it's not, it's a rejection from the writer I was five years ago, ten years ago. I felt like it was working a bit on my confidence, to be honest. I thought back to the stories, like not the overlook, because this was like the overlook story was, you know, uh, you can go back and listen to past episode also for this, but it was a really difficult market to get in, and it's with one shot that I had to get it published. So, of course, like I cannot base on this, but the story I wrote just before that, a flash fiction, I managed to get published just like that. So I'm like, okay, maybe this is not about anything about me, but it's just I need to let those stories go for now, and maybe when I get more of a name in the industry, I know that ontologies will come to you and ask you to contribute to their antologies, or I can just like maybe rework the story and resend it. I don't know, but it just felt like taking the time to submit it, even though it's not that big of a time, was just not like the best usage of my time, again, because it's limited. So that's what I decided to do for now. And even though I had an idea for a short story, and there was a call for an anthology that it would have fitted perfectly into, I really decided to keep my focus on the project that really excites me right now, and that I feel like both excites me and that I have fun working on, but also that they can move the needle in my career. I think both of those things are still important. And my agent is waiting on this version of the story that we can submit to editors. I know there are editors who really love my first novel who will be eager to read this one, so it really feels like my energy is better placed on this project. So that's basically it for the update part of the podcast. Not much to say since I was just turning away at this scene. But now we're moving forward. And so now the topic of the episode, it's not shitty, it's just unfinished. If you've been in the writing community for some time, you must have heard the sentence shitty first draft. It was popularized by Anne Lamotte. I think it's in Bird by Bird. I haven't checked out, but I know it's her. She used this as a way of saying the first draft will not be perfect, and don't expect it to be. So expect it to be a shitty first draft, and she she said she writes shitty first draft, and that's how it was introduced. I love the concept for the fact that it lowers the pressure on the first draft. Because we experience as a reader a book linearly as its published version, we can't have this weird impression that it was written exactly as that. Like the writer really sat down and typed word by word in this order, and then boom, it went to print. Again, if you've been anywhere near the publishing industry, you know that it's not how it works. And if you have attempted and managed to write a novel, you probably know that it's not how it works. Writing a novel is a process of you write and you go back and you edit and you add things and you remove things and you cut scenes and you add scenes. It's the process of always we're working with the same words, and it's okay like that. That's how it's supposed to be. But somehow I think we all end up at the same place where we're plotter, pencer, anywhere the way that we can approach our first draft. We all still always end up wanting it to be better than it will actually be, and it will always disappoint us. No matter how good our first draft are, they will always disappoint us because they are always farther away from the finish mark that we would love them to be. That's just a fact of life. So there is something about saying shitty first draft that really allows to lower this pressure of the first draft, doesn't need to be that close to the finishing line, that close to the version who will be published and consumed by readers. But there is underneath that notion, and again, going back to in episode 18, I thought about the thoughts hygiene and the importance of the words that you tell yourself about your project, the thoughts that you have, the conversation you have with other people, choosing your words is really important for how you will see the project. You will see your heart, you will see your career and your journey. Saying that your first draft is or even is supposed to be shitty, it includes this part of negativity to it. The notion of seeing it as just unfinished, I feel just puts it just in a different way. It's about not judging your work as you go and saying, is it good or not? Is it shitty or not? It's just unfinished and it isn't supposed to be judged on merits, on quality before it's finished. And I think the nuance is all there. And the moment where we get a bit discouraged when we're writing a first draft, or even when we're editing, I'm still there more often than I would like. You're writing, you're editing, because you've read a lot of novels, because you've read about the craft, you can't help yourself but to judge the work that you are creating and seeing its flaws. It's inevitable flaws because it's not finished. And that frustrated me when I heard my friends say that their first draft or the novel they were working on was shitty or was not good or anything because I was like, you cannot say that right now. It's not finished. Of course it doesn't work, but it doesn't matter, we don't care. And it got me really frustrated when I heard people I love saying those words about the creation. I knew in my heart when they would finish would be good. So it was like, why are you judging it right now? It's not finished. And that's where I came up with the metaphor of building a house. So my partner is a carpenter. We've built, I say we, but it's like a we that it's clothed myself a lot. I was there like in my project management, but that's a lot. It was all my partner. He built two our first house in the house that we live in right now. He built it all. And because I was there and I saw the process, it got me thinking of how when it was just a hole in the ground, I wouldn't say to him, but why didn't you put any windows in? Of course he will not put the windows in. They're just digging the hole where the foundation will be. So he doesn't care about the windows. And if I were to come in, or if it was a little voice in his mind saying, But you don't have windows, this isn't really a house. It would, it would first it would make no sense, but if it was like hit him misconfidence in the actual house of how it will look like, that would hurt. And I'm thinking, like, this is like big saying, okay, there is no windows when it's a hole in the ground, but so this is compared to the first draft. Like saying your sentence aren't pretty enough, flowing enough, you're using a lot of repetition. Saying that at the first draft level is exactly like saying, but you don't have windows on a house that's just a hole in the ground. That's exactly the same thing. So that's why the notion of unfinished is so important. But it goes deeper than that. Because at the first draft level, we can give ourselves some slack with time, with experience. But when we get further on in the editing process, for example, where I am, I have visibly like three draft paths left in front of me, minimum, maybe four. So I have the story grid one I'm doing, I have the line editing one, I have the one with my friends better reader, who accepted to read every scene and give me feedback, including a friend who hasn't read it yet. So she will have her first approach to the novel will be this new version. So I want to know how she feels about it when she hasn't read the previous version. And then I will edit according to their comment, and then I will send it to my agent who will also make comments. So I have four draft paths left in front of me before I can say it's finished, and even then, when it sells, it will, when it sells with the publisher, the publisher will also have his editor go in and give some suggestion, and then there will be a copy editor who will also come in and do it. There is so many still draft paths before this is the thing that people end up reading one day that I cannot have in my head that I see the flaws and let that make me think that what I'm writing is not good, but I don't know why, it always comes in, and it's the equivalent, me right now saying I really don't enjoy the way I'm showing emotion right now, like it's more told and showed, and I really want the reader to feel the emotion in the current draft past that I am. I know that I'm not achieving that, and being furiated at myself or worried or concerned at myself that right now this isn't accomplished in my draft, is exactly if when my partner has done what we call in Quebec the the rough, I don't know what it is in English, maybe it's rough too, but it's basically you just have the walls and the roof and the division inside and the floor inside, but inside the house and even outside, it's all just wood, it's just apparent wood, like there's nothing but the very rough wood everywhere. The house looks like a house, exactly like my novel right now looks like a novel, it has all the rooms it will have, and we can see what it will look like. This is the same place I am, basically, with my novel. Maybe a bit farther along, but just let's go with this. If at that point I came inside to visit the house my partner was building, and I were to say, but the floors are ugly. What why did you put those those floors in? What he would say, rightfully so, is I'm not at this part of the process yet. This is the floor we put in first, and it's on top of those floors that we will put the real floors that you will see all your life that I have right there, if you're looking on the video. Um, and actually, there's even a reason why he doesn't put those right away. It's because you want to put the paint on the wall first. Because if there is any splashes of paint, and there is also some people who will come in for ventilation, for electricity, for the plumbing. They need to walk inside the house a lot to do their work. So if it was like the finished floor from the beginning, it would get destroyed. It would be there for no reason, and then you would have to redo it. This is the exact same reason why I'm not working on this right now. This is the exact reason why right now I don't need to worry about my sentence looking good. Because I'm working on something bigger that I need to figure out first before I do the next step of the line editing. If I tried to put on the real flooring, the hard woods right now with my novel, working on my sentence all the way, I would screw them all up because I will need to add a paragraph, remove the paragraph, change something about this character or this bait or anything, had a turning point. So it doesn't make any sense for me to spend time doing this right now. I need to do it at the right step. So of course I cannot right now judge the quality of my book because it doesn't have all of its components that I've actually actively worked on or at least analyzed, looked at, and say, okay, this works. Until the moment where my partner had done every single thing in the house to make it a house and say this house is completed, I could not judge how it looked. I could not say this is a beautiful house or not because it was just finished. I didn't have all the components. So why? Why do we as writers judge the quality of what we are producing before we have the whole vision, before we've gone through every single step and at least analyze it? Sometimes we have natural talents in some ways. Like I know, for example, usually I don't have to do that much work on my dialogue. The dialogue just flow really easily to me. But I will still have at some point in the draft pass, I will look at the dialogue and just make sure they work the best that they can. At least you need to have done that this for every step of the process. It will be emotion, character development, the plot, the foreshadowing, the description. There is so many components inside a novel that makes a novel work. If you try to make them work at once, it's like trying to put the windows and the hard floor on a house that's just a hole in the ground. You will not make it. There's a reason why they build house the way that they do. It's because it's the most efficient process to finish in the last cost in the last time possible and have the most beautiful, strong house that you possibly can. It's the same thing with the novel, the exact same thing. But because they are words, we tend to forget that it's exactly the same thing and that it works exactly like a house, and we need to work on it layer by layer, looking at it one at a time. Or sometimes when I say I will do one draft past for a line editing, and I know I'm going to include description in there, I know I'm going to include like emotions, make sure that they are shown and not told. This is all going to be one draft past, but I will still in my mind, okay, see okay, this sentence needs more work on this thing, but I will not go about it and try to do everything at this at once, it would be too much. I will still take time and adjust because this is how you build a strong, beautiful, amazing novel. It's layer by layer, one at a time, and it's also how you're going to, even though the goal is not to save your time. And I did a reel on that video on TikTok. You can go check that out. How the goal isn't to preserve your time, and it's Sissy Lira and the shit about writing. I don't know which episode I should have written down in which episode she said that. But she was talking, Sissy Lira is a literary agent, and she was talking with the writer about her process and how it goes. And at some point, the author went and said, Oh, but this takes more time. Like what she decided to do to finish her novel was something that took more time. And Cece said, But the goal is not to preserve your time, the goal is this piece of art that you're creating, and that's what she managed to do. And she was like, This is time well spent if it creates a better work of art. I completely agree with that, but I don't agree with wasting time at places of the process where it doesn't help the process and it doesn't help the finished product. When you're working on a novel, keep in mind at all times that it's unfinished. And if you see something that doesn't work, go and just write down a note for yourself. It would be like if my partner, when he was looking around the hole in the ground, was saying, Oh, I need to put those windows in, I think they are really pretty. It will go and then he had like this notes on his phone where he would put like his idea and inspiration for what he wanted to do in the entire house. And he would write down, I want those windows in. That was the only thing he could do because he was not there. So do the same thing. When you see something that doesn't work, instead of telling yourself, Oh, my first draft is shitty, my book is shitty, I'm not good, this is not good, nothing works, nothing will ever work. Just stop yourself and say, Okay, it's it's unfinished, it's just unfinished. And this thing, take a note for yourself. Okay, when I get to this part of the process, I will go in and I will work on this thing. Take notes, and that's the way you will know you won't forget the ideas that you have to or how to improve. You want to capture those ideas, you want to improve your story, but just one thing at a time and not overwhelm yourself with wanting to fix everything in one go. And again, that's what I said in the previous episode where I talked about this. The words that you use are so important because it can seem like, okay, I just call my work shitty or it's not good or it sucks right now. And you can think that those words don't have really an impact, but they do. This is the if you keep on repeating to yourself always that your book is not good, it's not good enough, it doesn't work, it's shitty, you keep on repeating that to yourself over and over again, you could get really discouraged, and that's when you start to write less. That's when you put it on the side, that's when you have the new shiny idea syndrome because you think, oh, this is a an idea flaw. When it's not an idea flaw, it's just not finished. So you think, okay, if I have this other idea, then my house would be beautiful. But it doesn't, I'm mixing the middle. Sorry, but it's like if my partner, when he does this rough, he was like, we cannot live in this house, like it's it's like just hard wood everywhere, it's ugly, like it doesn't work. And oh, you would see like another piece of land like further away, and you would say, Okay, if we build it here, like the house would be better, and then it started building another house there. No, our house was perfectly okay, it was just not finished. That's what you do when you keep on telling yourself that it's not good, it's not good, it's not good. But if you start saying to yourself in this moment where you doubt your story or you you doubt your capacity even to do it, you just say it's just unfinished, it's not not good. I don't mean to judge its quality right now, it's just unfinished. Let me take a note, let me make sure that I work on this thing. It changes the attitude you have toward your work, and that could be the thing that leads you to keep on working on it and to eventually finish it because this is the goal in the end. The goal in the end is to have the finished house that you could put on the market and sell. So if you compare your house, your novel to a house, you would say the moment where I can go and pitch it to publisher is the moment you would say a house is ready to go on market and be sold. So if there is no art floors or if there are no bad tub, you cannot go and sell it. You need to work on it more. The goal is to have this finished product. You know, I'm always talking about this podcast in the lens of you want to be traditionally published. So it needs to be this finished thing that you can then go and try to sell either to an agent to represent you or to an editor to publish it. This is the goal to finish the book. But it's only when you are you reach that stage on your own, it's okay, there will be other people who come in. But there is a part that's just on your own with yourself. There is a point where you need to yourself let it go and say, okay, it's ready for other people to come in. You need to wait until you've done every step of the process yourself before you judge its quality, before you say, Okay, is it good or is it not good? Of course, along the way, you will see when it's that good and you will work on it, but only judge yourself and your work when you have a finished project. And of course, another thing that will help a lot with the mindset as you're working on a novel, something that it's so long to do, it's it takes usually years to go through this entire process, it's to see the good that you're doing along the way. So notice the good sentence that you write, notice the scenes that are really banging, notice this like cliffhanger that you manage to do right, because along the way you will always do some things right, and there are other things that you need to work on. But if you've put your focus more on the things that you do do right along the way, it will also be more encouraging and leave the global judgment of the thing that you're creating for the moment when you're done and it's finished. So I hope this little mindset shift helps you. This way of talking about your work, of thinking about your work as you're going through. Um, if it can be helpful, I know I've done it for so many things, but you get to write it on a little post-it, put it somewhere close to where you're writing so that you see it. It's not shitty, it doesn't suck, it's just unfinished. To remind yourself and keep that in mind. And if you found this episode useful, don't hesitate to share it with a friend who think you could who could benefit from it. We can also take a screenshot and share it on your social media to tell people that you're listening. Don't forget to tag me if you do that at Lefty O Bay. I really, really love to see that you you are listening. You can also email me. The email is in the show notes if you want to say anything. I want this to be really a conversation with you all. If you enjoyed the podcast, again, there is the co-fire when you can support the podcast, which I really appreciate. If you don't or you can't, you can always also subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. It's free, but it really helps the podcast to reach more people. So if you enjoy it, it can be a really simple way to help. And I wish you a lovely week of writing. We'll see each other next week.