P1 Writing Process and “Shitty First Drafts”

When producing my first draft of project one, I was working in the student center. It was around 5:00 pm so there were a few people there but it wasn’t too loud. It took me about an hour-an hour an a half to think of all eleven elements of what goes into being a “women varsity golfer in high school in Ridgefield, CT”, and about 10 minutes to create the mind map itself. Although it took some time, it is a topic that I am interested in, so I didn’t mind doing the work. It made me think a lot about the relevance of the discourse community and what ecologies goes into it. It made me feel proud about completing the work and being happy with the ideas I came up with. At the same time, I felt a little nervous/anxious about how “good” it is and if it would make sense to other people by just looking at it, but I know that it will be revised and worked on and eventually be a great and proud piece of work.

When reading Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts”, it reminded me a lot of my writing process, which makes me feel good that writing isn’t always easy even to the most talented writers in the field. Writing is messy and you have to start from nothing to create something. Lamott talks a lot about how writers start their work off in an informal, and simple way of just writing down whatever they think. They can write pages and pages of words and ultimately end up maybe using one great sentence from those pages, which I find very fascinating. It takes a lot of dedication and patience to be able to sit down and cut out pages of work that you maybe spent a few hours on for only a few words to make it to the public eye. I understand where she is coming from when she says sometimes she wants to give up because she can’t come up with the right words and after some time it can take a lot of mental strain. But she is right when she says you just have to start off with a bad first draft and get some ideas written down, because they can only get better.