This excerpt from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird spoke to me, and it probably speaks to a lot of people. Even those of us who are not professional writers have had to deal with writing rough drafts at one time or another. I especially enjoyed Lamott's description of how most people envision professional writers at work, "typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter," because there was a time in my life when I had this image of perfection set as a goal in my mind. As a child, I wanted to be a writer, and I NEVER wrote rough drafts. Of course my teachers taught me that they were important, but I absolutely refused to write them. In the time that the other kids were writing three or four copies of their essays, each one better than the one before it, I would be poring over just one copy, my first attempt, trying to make it perfect. I wish I could look back now and say, "Ah, how foolish I was," but I'm actually embarrassed to say that I haven't changed all that much over the years when it comes to writing rough drafts. Little 9-year-old perfectionist Juliana's thought process was as follows: "If it's not as close to perfect as possible on the first try, then I didn't really try my best and therefore I'm not ready to move on to a new draft." So little Juliana would sit there and make sure that her rough draft was beautiful in every way. She would skip the whole "write the first word that comes to your mind" thing and start refining her language right off the bat. Instead of describing something as "pretty," she would skim through the thesaurus and eventually settle on the word "pulchritudinous," a word she knew her peers would not discover until their third draft, and this knowledge was delightful! She was so ahead of the game...the teacher was sure to be impressed by her extensive vocabulary. Little Juliana would dissect each individual sentence as she went along, checking for grammar and spelling errors. When she was finally finished, she would turn it in to the teacher for approval, and, unsurprisingly, the teacher would be hard pressed to find anything wrong with it. Unfortunately, more often than not, the teacher would praise little Juliana for her exceptional work and tell her that it was unnecessary for her to do a second draft. And little Juliana would think to herself, "Mission accomplished!"
Ten years later, grown-up Juliana often thinks to herself, "I wish more of my grade school teachers forced me to write drafts instead of indulging my innate tendency to strive for perfection and value the result more than the process." I was led to believe that "shitty first drafts" were for the weak. The result? Fear. I'm afraid of what will appear on the page if I simply let myself go and allow myself to write something that is literally terrible just to get my ideas flowing. I do believe that Anne Lamott's concept of "the child's draft" is important; in fact, I believe that this kind of uninhabited writing is essential for the writer who wishes to stretch the limits of the imagination. But I personally struggle to embrace my writing in such a fashion. So great is my fear of failure that I tend to limit my own potential by isolating individual thoughts within my stream of consciousness, labeling them as "unsuitable," and blocking them out. This is exactly the wrong way to approach a rough draft. At this point in my life, I am actively trying to improve the shittiness of my writing, because deep down I know that sloppy copies are important to the process and will ultimately set me up for great results.
I completely relate to Lamott's attitude toward "trust[ing] the process"; she explains in the excerpt that she still experiences fear of rejection after she writes her rough drafts, before she goes in and fixes them up. I think it's something that's bound to be scary no matter how experienced you are because you end up with something that doesn't quite feel like it's yours, something you're not really proud of, something...well, something shitty.
This excerpt transported me back to the summer before my senior year of high school, the time when I was under the false impression that my Common App essay was going to be the most important thing I ever wrote in my entire life. It was torture. I hadn't written a rough draft for an essay in years, and I must have written at least ten really shitty rough drafts for my Common App essay. I was trying to follow the advice of every high school teacher I knew and allow my emotions to flow through my writing. I knew what my topic was going to be, but for some reason I was struggling to figure out exactly how to articulate my feelings. (In this case, the biggest problem was that I was trying to describe a moment in my life that I had deemed too beautiful for words, but that's beside the point). The point is that I was suffering from intense writer's block, and, for the first time, I was trying to solve the problem the way my teachers had once tried in vain to show little 9-year-old Juliana how to do. I forced myself to write draft after draft until it was just right, and I was particularly proud of the result because it had been written freely and without fear.
Although I myself have not mastered the art of letting a shitty first draft spill from my mind onto the page (and yes, it is an art, and it is a skill that must be acquired), I recognize that rough drafts are important in the creation of any kind of art. As Anne Lamott says, "All good writers write them." It just makes sense because art doesn't come from nothing; you must create something before you can turn it into something good.
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