Anne Lamott's Summary: Shitty First Drafts
Shitty First Drafts Summary
‘Shitty first drafts’ is an excerpt from the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It informs us about the importance of the shitty first drafts in the development of quality content for books, articles, essays and whatever else a writer intends to produce. Lamott claims that all writers write these drafts and that is how they eventually end up with the great subsequent drafts that they release to the public. She adds that the idea people have where a writer wakes up and has it all together in terms of what they will write is a fallacy that rarely happens. The author informs us that the only effective way through which she does her writing is by first putting down ‘really, really shitty first drafts.’ She begins by letting out all the ideas she has on paper bearing in mind that no one is going to see what she has written. This gives her the confidence to go on. Even though these ideas may be all over the place, there is something in the midst of it all that stands out and leads her in the direction that she would take. She explains to us by saying,
‘You just let this childlike part of you …show more content…
First off, she would go to the restaurant with her friends to try out the food and get their opinions. She would then write notes about the opinions they give, and this would be template she would use to write these reviews. Later on when she would sit down to start writing and she describes this experience by saying, ‘I’d try to write a lead, but instead I would write a couple of dreadful sentences, XX everything out, and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron’. It wasn’t at all easy for her bearing in mind that she had done this for a long time. After beating herself up for a while, she would always come to the conclusion that all she had to do is to write the shitty draft and the writing process would
‘Shitty first drafts’ is an excerpt from the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It informs us about the importance of the shitty first drafts in the development of quality content for books, articles, essays and whatever else a writer intends to produce. Lamott claims that all writers write these drafts and that is how they eventually end up with the great subsequent drafts that they release to the public. She adds that the idea people have where a writer wakes up and has it all together in terms of what they will write is a fallacy that rarely happens. The author informs us that the only effective way through which she does her writing is by first putting down ‘really, really shitty first drafts.’ She begins by letting out all the ideas she has on paper bearing in mind that no one is going to see what she has written. This gives her the confidence to go on. Even though these ideas may be all over the place, there is something in the midst of it all that stands out and leads her in the direction that she would take. She explains to us by saying,
‘You just let this childlike part of you …show more content…
First off, she would go to the restaurant with her friends to try out the food and get their opinions. She would then write notes about the opinions they give, and this would be template she would use to write these reviews. Later on when she would sit down to start writing and she describes this experience by saying, ‘I’d try to write a lead, but instead I would write a couple of dreadful sentences, XX everything out, and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron’. It wasn’t at all easy for her bearing in mind that she had done this for a long time. After beating herself up for a while, she would always come to the conclusion that all she had to do is to write the shitty draft and the writing process would