“Everyone’s first pages are awful. Just hold your nose and write. Today’s sh*t is tomorrow’s compost.” – Hallie Ephron
The reason this works is that bad first pages aren't failures, they're raw material. You can't revise a blank page, but you can revise a messy one, and writing badly gets the real story out from under all your self-conscious hedging. Say you're stuck on an opening scene: instead of polishing one sentence for an hour, write the whole scene fast and wrong, let characters say obvious things, let the setting be vague. Finish it. Only then do you have compost to work with, something rich enough to pull a better version from. The caution is that compost still needs tending. If you never come back to till it, sharpen the dialogue, cut the dead weight, it just stays a pile. Permission to write badly is the first step, not the whole process.
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