Shitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott from her book,
Bird by Bird
In the
following selection, taken from Lamott’s popular book about writing, Bird by Bird
(1994), she argues for the need to let go and write those “shitty first
drafts” that lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and
third drafts.
Now, practically even better news than
that of short assignments is the idea of
shitty first drafts. All good
writers write them. This is how they end up with good second
drafts and
terrific third
drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are
getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and
think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a
million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent
they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a
few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times
to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as
fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the
uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write
beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them
sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one
of them writes elegant
first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we
do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner
life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I
mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume
you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates
all the same people you do.)
Very few writers really know what
they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their
business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up
sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across
the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and
says to himself nicely, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because
you do -- you can either type, or kill yourself." We all often feel
like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being
the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not
come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is
said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning
-- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away,
humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might
hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.
For me
and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact,
the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really,
really
shitty first drafts. The
first draft is the child's
draft, where
you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing
that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You
just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions
come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say,
"Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?," you let her. No one is going to see
it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional
territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may
be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have
gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in
the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just
love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're
supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you
might go -- but there was no way to get to this without
first getting
through the
first five and a half pages.
I used to write food
reviews for California magazine before it folded. (My writing food
reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every
single review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers
took umbrage at my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various
ex-presidents' brains.) These reviews always took two days to write.
First I'd go to a restaurant several times with a few opinionated,
articulate friends in tow. I'd sit there writing down everything anyone
said that was at all interesting or funny. Then on the following Monday
I'd sit down at my desk with my notes and try to write the review. Even
after I'd been doing this for years, panic would set in. I'd try to
write a lead, but instead I'd write a couple of dreadful sentences, XX
them out, try again, XX everything out, and then feel despair and worry
settle on my chest like an x-ray apron. It's over, I'd think calmly. I'm
not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I'm ruined.
I'm through. I'm toast. Maybe, I'd think, I can get my old job back as a
clerk-typist. But probably not. I'd get up and study my teeth in the
mirror for a while. Then I'd stop, remember to breathe, make a few phone
calls, hit the kitchen and chow down. Eventually I'd go back and sit
down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes. Finally I would pick
up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer, and
every time the answer would come: all I had to do was to write a really
shitty first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going
to see it.
So I'd start writing without reining myself in. It
was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing
would be terrible. I'd write a lead paragraph that was a whole page,
even though the entire review could only be three pages long, and then
I'd start writing up descriptions of the food, one dish at a time, bird
by bird, and the critics would be sitting on my shoulders, commenting
like cartoon characters. They'd be pretending to snore, or rolling
their eyes at my overwrought descriptions, no matter how hard I tried to
tone those descriptions down, no matter how conscious I was of what a
friend said to me gently in my early days of restaurant reviewing.
"Annie," she said, "it is just a piece of chicken. It is just a bit of
cake."
But because by then I had been writing for so long, I
would eventually let myself trust the process -- sort of, more or less.
I'd write a
first draft that was maybe twice as long as it should be,
with a self-indulgent and boring beginning, stupefying descriptions of
the meal, lots of quotes from my black-humored friends that made them
sound more like the Manson girls than food lovers, and no ending to
speak of. The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous
that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car
before I could write a decent second
draft. I'd worry that people would
read what I'd written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot.
The
next day, I'd sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out
everything I possibly could, find a new lead somewhere on the second
page, figure out a kicky place to end it, and then write a second
draft.
It always turned out fine, sometimes even funny and weird and helpful.
I'd go over it one more time and mail it in. Then, a month later, when
it was time for another review, the whole process would start again,
complete with the fears that people would find my
first draft before I
could rewrite it.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible
first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something
-- anything -- down on paper. A friend of mine says that the
first draft
is the down
draft -- you just get it down. The second
draft is the up
draft -- you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more
accurately. And the third
draft is the dental
draft, where you check
every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God
help us, healthy.
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