Step 24: Complete Your First Ridiculously Rough Draft

>>This post is geared more towards the writers out there, but if you can find a way to work it into your own life, more power to ya!<<

Rough drafts are like roller coasters. When you first get the idea for a story, you jump right on in that line regardless of how long the wait time is. You race between the metal bars, writing everything in your brain down as quickly as you can, thinking that things are going to go smoothly and you'll have an awesome experience in no time. Eventually though, you hit that wall, that end of the line, and you're stuck thinking and thinking and thinking, until finally the line moves a couple feet. You know what you want to write, and you scurry to write it down. Then you're stopped again, waiting and thinking.

Finally, you're up on the platform - you're next in line to get on the roller coaster. You can actually see the shape that your story's going to take, and it looks terrifying. There's a huge drop, twists and turns, parts where everything gets turned up side down and nothing makes sense anymore. Suddenly, you want out of that line, want to walk right on through when the gates swing forward and usher you to your designated seat. You don't want to get on that ride anymore - what if something malfunctions, and your story's not as good as you thought it was?

But your friends and family are dragging you onto the ride, some calling you chicken, others trying to convince you that you're more likely to be in a car accident than to die in an amusement park. The lap bar comes down, and now you're stuck with what you're doing.

Rereading that first ridiculously rough draft that you worked on while waiting in line - that's the part when you're going up that first big hill. It's horrible. You want to bail, but you can't, so you just keep reading. But that moment when the coaster slows for just a millisecond at the top as it crests the hill, in that moment you can see everything that your story could be. It's terrifying, but at the same time exhilarating.

I haven't started revising my own story yet, but I think it's going to be the fun part of the roller coaster (which is incidentally the things that terrify you from the platform - the drops, the twists and turns, the loop-de-loop). It'll be crazy, and parts of it you won't be able to remember, but in the end nothing will malfunction, and you'll hop off that roller coaster with a completed story and an itch to do it all over again.

So my question to you: How do you write stories? I've never done a ridiculously rough first draft before - I'm usually one of those perfectionists who makes sure the first paragraph is the best that it can be before moving on, so this go around I tried writing my rough draft like all of my creative writing teachers told me to.
And my challenge to you: If you've never done a ridiculously rough draft before, try it. It's horrible and I hated doing it, but I did feel good being able to say that I had the complete story basically done.