Lamott's Shitty First Drafts
I don't believe writers type their work routinely as court reporters or as if illuminated by God either. According to Lamott, drafting is an important stage in the process of a good writer’s work since it leads to a second and third drafts stages and eventually to the final draft, like all art work when is being shaped in the atelier. It seems almost funny to me to mention it but it matches the good sense of humor and imagination displayed through her writing.
I've notice a slight difference between the writing process she mentions and the one I do. She has what she calls “the child’s draft”; she kind of sees its growth through the number of drafts. This is why she probably can say “this work was finished in its fifth or eighth draft”. I don't quite know how to shape the ideas that I have at the moment that I'm writing either, but I definitely know that I have something to say way before sitting when pen in hand, so to say...
My hardest work is not specifically in the writing itself but in the process of collecting the elements that would help in the shaping and clustering ideas like sentences, dialogs, words, ideas, books, pictures, articles, music, films, etc. Only when I consider I have all I need, while figuring its form, I start to write. So I don't have many drafts, but I do have many “stuff”.
Something more similar to the process she describes she did when used to write for the folded food magazine; she was an explorer gathering ideas first.
I do believe in miracles, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't seat to stare at the screen or a blank paper for hours waiting for someone else kind of write for me or bring me an idea out of the blue. If I don't have the inspirational source, the cause for me being there, the reason of what I'm about to do, or in other words; if I haven't done my homework of even thinking about it, I'd rather dedicate my time doing something else because it just won't happen. Waiting for the muse is what in my dictionary is described as laziness.
My hardest writing works I ever had are screenplays. Believe me when I say that you wouldn't like to be my roommate in a time like that. You wouldn't want to even see me around, not until I'm well done with it, because you'd see me like going through a sort of trance. I do panic, get frustrated, and mad, go to jog around (if it rains, snows or is 3am is a detail not worth to give it a second thought), quick shower, check the cat, talk with the fish; think he’s beautiful, and get a tea, then a coffee, then a glass of water, wishing to be in another place, then sit and up again for another jog, shower, tea and coffee, check the time, the fish and the cat and get more mad and water uncountable times when I surprise myself unable to find the words that describe best what I need to say in the way it has to be said. Not to mention that I wallpaper my room playing with colored sequences, characters, locations, props, and music (oh! I hear the same piece of music trillions of times with a timer until the scene is done. You know, normal people enjoy the music and go through a difficult time at finding sense at this kind of behaviour) and I do many other things like this, but let me stress here that I always know exactly what I want to communicate. I dislike fatty words to kill time.
Inspite of all this wrestling, I do get in love and full of indescribable satisfaction when the work is marked as “done”.
Lamott shows me how other writers accomplish their work, it doesn’t matter which process work best for them, they're committed to what they do and they struggle to give their best.
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Works Cited
* Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird; Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1995. New York. Print
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