In the selection “Shitty First Drafts” from her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott asserts that all good writers write shitty first drafts. It’s the first draft – not meant to be seen by anyone, just meant to be unleashed, to get it out and get it down – that leads to the vision of a good second draft, and even better third. According to Lamott, “few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.” Lamott grants us permission to write poorly and without early judgement, that for her impedes writing from happening, so long as we commit ourselves to completing that first draft before we begin to meticulously revise and rework our writings. No plan is required and rough edges are encouraged.
In theory, I would love to hack away at a first draft, paint splatter to the page with text, messy and hap hazardous, free reigned and unbothered. And once it’s all out there – “shitty”, as Lamott would have it, but seen to its end – step back to perhaps spot a streak or splotch (sentence or thought) that might lead me to say ‘Aha! That’s what this piece calls for’. But, that is not me. I cannot set out to write with any other intention than to produce what I hope will resemble my final draft (even though it probably won’t). I can’t move on from an unrefined sentence nor leave an unformed thought dangling. I find that to be an unsettling and distracting to just leave it be, knowing it’s all off. I rarely move beyond a couple sentences at a time, as I draft, before I read and rewrite them. Then a couple sentences more, and back to the beginning of the thought. With each new sentence, is a revisit to the one prior, and each paragraph completed calls me to take it from the top. Perhaps no thought or paragraph is more reworked than my introduction in a draft, and I refuse move on until it is near set.
In his essay “Rethinking the Shitty First Draft”, George Dila too refuses to write a shitty first draft, doing precisely what Lamott advises against, in revising as he goes. Dila, a self-proclaimed obsessive, writes his first draft slowly and carefully, relentlessly reworking it throughout. In his venue of short story fiction, where it is incumbent upon the writer to craft an opening on which the rest of the story depends, he will rework his opening sentence until he is satisfied. In similar fashion, I will craft my introduction until I feel I have a base for the rest of my writing to stand on and bound off from. Until I can stand the sound of my piece (and the piece that lay ahead, to unfold from there). And like Dila, many versions of a draft live within my “first” draft. While I do continuously rework as I move through an initial draft (and subsequent ones), I am willing to dismantle and redirect an entire draft. To eliminate and discard ideas, and pick up new ones sparked within my writing – sometimes this is evident when I am three paragraphs deep, three pages deep, or three drafts. But I don’t wait for the first to be finished, to do so. The first draft can be the hardest for me, but it is because so many drafts do exist within that first one.
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