First Drafts & Imagined Audiences

After four hours of steady work, I have a new story of 4200 hundred words. Right now, it's just a dialogue in which a story happens, and not a proper short story yet. In other words, it's a first draft with a long, long way to go. But what a pleasure, what a relief, to write like this, letting the piece simply unfold as a conversation with a kind and sympathetic person rather than writing with, say, Deborah Treisman's responses foremost in my mind.