I would like to think I do not write shitty drafts. Although I long for the confidence of George Dila in his ability to, the writer in me simply knows that is not the case. What we have in common is our obsessive desire to revise while writing – in fact, the very first line of this writing is a revision. My shitty first draft will always look shitty, that’s for sure. I must write, pen to paper, before typing out anything. Markups, scratched out thoughts, words and misspellings, long lines with arrows at their ends showing where previously written sentences should be. I simply cannot help myself.
However, Anne Lamott is correct here, that initial burst of writing is necessary for me. It allows for all my thoughts to percolate so the formulator in me can check as I go. I think of it as my adult-self looking over my shoulder and lovingly nudging me to correct my writing. She is not intense, overbearing, or bitchy. She is not here to make me feel shitty about my shitty draft, she simply wants to be obliged. She is quite nurturing but firm, as I tend to be unable to continue until I make the necessary changes. This allows me to not judge my writing as shitty or not – I do not write for me; I write to be felt by my reader. They might think it is shitty, but I will not. When I come back to my work with fresh eyes, I am the reader, then and only then do I judge myself. I know that along the way I have revised and could probably use some more and that allows for me to not be so hard on myself – it quells the perfectionist in me.
What stuck out to me was the fact that no writer writes well at first, although I know this to be a tried-and-true statement, the purist in me needs to be reminded of that constantly so it was nice of Anne Lamott to do this within the first five seconds of her work. This brings me to another point, whilst Dila may be averse to admitting it, he writes shitty first drafts too. The perfectionist in him just will not allow it to be a shitty first draft. As a poet and short-story writer myself, I understand the power of the punch – jam packed intensity in a short amount of line (Ha! Get it?), but even the art of revising implies he is aware of the shittiness. His formulator will not allow him to move on either. After all, he has labeled himself as an obsessive and his writing as “painstakingly laborious” which means he must constantly fix his work. Anne Lamott would say he is in the “get it down” and “fix it up” phase all at once but that still implies the draft is shitty, no?
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