Sh*tty First Drafts

I don't know what it is, but most of the books/essays/talks about writing that I've found most helpful to me are by people whose prose I really don't care for in the slightest. An excellent example of this is Anne Lamott, her Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is helping me a lot yet again. Here's a sample:

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 coming 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 sh*tty 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 you might go--but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.

NaNoWriMo is all about sh*tty first drafts, in fact, it's what's really helped me get to the point that I can produce them.

I'm so glad I have that freedom. Yesterday's output was truly dreadful--one chapter of nothing but exposition, a lot of telling, practically no showing. It was so bad that Dan Brown would take a look at it and say, "Dude." And it's going to be torturous to go back and edit it come December. However, it really enabled me to work out most of the rationale and mechanics of the science and technology that form the basis of my novel. My vague idea is a lot more concrete now. Sure it's an ugly, misshapen, pile of concrete that no one (not even a Modern Art Museum) would want to display--but it's something I can build on.

How's that for a mixed metaphor? Clearly I haven't rewritten anything in this post (aside from fixing a typo or seven in the Lamott quotation)...just another in a series of sh*tty first drafts.