Shitty First Drafts

"Shitty First Drafts" was an interesting selection. I believe everything in the piece is true and should be taken to heart for anyone who writes, yet I have spent 10 minutes writing these first two sentences. My perception of writers before reading this piece was that all writers were inspired every day and would write from dawn to dusk. If my memory is correct, J.K. Rowling was inspired to write the first Harry Potter book while riding a train. I then assumed that every writer had an "aha" moment and then cranked out page after page until the masterpiece was completed. After reading Shitty First Drafts, I realize that my assumption was completely wrong. Some writers do have "aha" moments, but very few can wake up and write from dawn to dusk.

The second part of the selection focused more on Anne Lamott's experiences of writing food reviews. She would experience agonizing stress over writing a good review. The cycle of eat the food, take notes, attempt to write a review, almost die, take a deep breath, and then write everything on her mind, would happen each month. I can relate to some of her cycle. First, I do love to eat, but not in order to write reviews. Second, I almost always try to sit down and write a perfect paper whenever I start. I'm a big math guy and writing one draft versus three drafts seems much more efficient. Lastly, after trying to write a perfect draft, I do end up writing what is on my mind. This is largely influenced by my mom who would always say, "Just get something down on the paper and then we can talk". She is a very good editor, but needed something to work with. I think that many wonderful thoughts and ideas are lost from intelligent people who can think faster than they can write or type. Their mind is on line twenty six, but the paper is still on line five. It would make life so much easier if a machine was invented that would write out what someone was thinking. The amount of data coming from the machine would be ginormous, and some things quite funny, but it would allow for great ideas to be saved that otherwise would have been lost in the mind.