While reading Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts”, my immediate thought was wow, I love how she expresses herself. She wasn’t afraid to say that writers don’t write elegant first drafts and that they don’t really know what they’re doing until they’ve already done it. Not only that but she brought humor into her piece as well. It kept me engaged. Her main claim was that shitty first drafts are meant to help relieve any pressure/anxiety from writers who are focusing too hard on making the paper perfect. Viewing the draft in this way allows the writer to write however they please then shape it later. I really liked this idea and have actually used it before because sometimes I’ll have so many ideas at one time and not be able to form the sentence I’m trying to get out and it’ll cause me to have writer’s block. So it helps to just write down random things and put it together at the end.
On the other hand, In Renee Long’s “Why I Reject The Idea of Shitty First Drafts (And What I Do Instead)”, she argues that although when you need tough love shitty drafts can be great, at other times they could just make you feel more shitty about yourself and be unmotivating. No one wants to view their writing as shit. Instead, another way to look at it is as a seed draft. She gives us an example of an acorn. On the inside it carries the seeds of an oak tree. Now although that acron may be small, it can grow into something big and beautiful. The acorn being your first draft and the oak tree being your final draft. This concept is meant to ground you to reality and I thought it was a really good way to look at writing. Too many people in this world already struggle with thinking negatively about themselves, there’s no reason to encourage that. We deserve to be kind to ourselves. Writing is hard. Life is hard. Literally everything is hard but with a positive mindset we can push ourselves to do whatever we want.
Overall I enjoyed both articles and found both perspectives to be enlightening. I don’t think I necessarily preferred one over the other because I think they can both be used successfully. I personally will probably switch between the two depending on the context of future papers.
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