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Starting

to

Write

Shitty First Drafts

Anne Lamott

"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 like 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" (22).

Shitty First Drafts

"For me and most 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" (22).

Shitty First Drafts

"The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later....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 and 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" (22).

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Doubleday, 1994.

Clarity

"Each of us has a miraculous mind full of associations, ideas, and richly remembered experiences. If we are writing out of our childhood, that childhood may be as vivid in our memory as a movie we have watched fifteen, twenty, or one hundred times....But all that our readers have--without our carefully crafted assistance--is...a white page covered with black symbols" (7).

Dinty Moore

Clarity

"And even if we aren't writing from memory--if instead we are trying to string together an extended metaphor or to explain a particularly complex sequence of assumptions leading to a logical conclusion--remember that we as authors arrive at an understanding well before the reader. It is our job to transfer what we've seen, remembered, reasoned, or imagined. If the reader does not comprehend, we have failed to do our task well" (8).

Moore, Dinty W. Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Writer's Digest, 2010.

Reading

"One learns clearly what not to do by reading bad prose--one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridge of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lecturers thrown in" (146)

Stephen King

Reading

"Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like the The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good, old-fashioned jealousy--"I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand"--but such feelings can also serve as a spur goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing--of being flattened, in fact--is a part of every writer's necessary formation" (146).

Reading

"So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read to experience different styles....If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that" (147).

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir. Scribner, 2000.

Exploring

"The explorer has expectations but seeks the unexpected: the animal with two tails, the mountain range that is not on any map, what hides beyond Mars. Most people fear surprise, but the writer-explorer must be comfortable with surprise, the sentence that turns on the writer and attacks his or her strongest belief, the phrase that undercuts the argument, the word that drags the essay writer toward an unpredicted conclusion....Writing carries you forward at top speed and sometimes you crash, but it is worth it when you have a thought new to you, when you understand your world in a way you never have before" (26).

Donald Murray

Exploring

"Good writing often lies in the unexpected line, not the expected....The accident--the wrong word that is exactly the right word--is the place where an effective piece of writing takes off. Writers look for the edge, the place where there is new information, a different angle of vision, a form pushed to its limits, a voice that has not been heard before" (27).

Exploring

"Writers question....Writers work in the territory of doubt. They are skeptical. This does not mean disbelief or cynicism; that is the belief there can be no belief. Writers are optimists, realistic optimists; writers are builders, makers of meaning. But to make their meaning they stand apart" (31).

Exploring

"The writer brings order to chaos. The world confuses; the writer clarifies. Where others see a jumble of unrelated events, facts, details, ideas, experiences, the writers sees a pattern that reveals meaning.

"Look for these patterns....There are many forms of patterns, but once you glimpse a pattern, you may find everything fitting into it, and you will have some writing to do. The draft tests the pattern and the final draft shares it" (32).

Exploring

"Humans are problem-solving animals. We are never as happy as when we find a problem that we believe we can solve. I remember the excitement the surgeon tried to suppress when he suggested taking out my heart and working on it. He had a problem to solve--and I certainly hoped he could solve it. He did.

"Writers often see a territory to explore when they spot a problem that is central to the material and that interests them" (33).

Murray, Donald M. The Craft of Revision. Harcourt Brace, 1991.

the drafting process

"When you first sit down to work, you may have no idea what the writing will bring. Maybe it even scares you a little, the thought of venturing into that unknown territory. Perhaps you circle your desk a while, wary of the task at hand. You pick up your cup of coffee in two hands and gaze out the window; you remember an email you meant to answer. You get up and check the mailbox, picking a few dead leaves of the coleus plant in the window. You sit down. You get up and change your shirt, appraise yourself in the mirror a long time, and come back to your desk. Maybe you pick up a book of poetry and read a few lines, put it down. You pick up your pen and write a word, then another. You go back and erase. You begin again" (182).

Brenda

Miller

The DRAFTING PROCESS

"Or maybe you are the type of writer who can sit down and start writing without hesitation, training yourself to write at least one full paragraph before stopping. You know you'll go back and trim and revise, so you just keep the words coming. You give yourself an hour, and you don't move from your chair in all that time. That hour, if the writing goes well, turns into two or three. You work steadily and pile up pages" (182).

The drafting process

"Either way, the important thing to know, for yourself, is your own style. In the first case, to the untrained eye you may appear engaged in nothing but mere procrastination; certainly you are not writing. But if you know yourself well, you understand that this puttering is essential to your writing process. Some thought has been brewing in your brain now for several days, perhaps weeks, or months. This idea needs your body to occupy itself while the essay forms itself into something fleshy and sturdy enough to survive outside the mind and on the bleak terrain of the page. Or, in the second case, you act more like an athlete in training, knowing that routine and discipline are essential for your creative process....Neither way is 'correct.' The only correct way to write is the way that works for you" (183).

The drafting process

"The writing process is just that: a process. You must have patience to watch the piece evolve, and you need an awareness of your own stages. You must know when you can go pell-mell with the heat of creation, and when you must settle down, take a wider view, and make some choices that will determine the essay's final shape" (183).

Miller, Brenda, and Suzanne Paola. Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. 2nd edition. McGraw-Hill, 2012.

Audience

"Write for readers. Ask yourself how every sentence and every line will strike the reader. That way you can see if you're misleading, or boring, the readers. Of course, it's hard to read your work when you've just written it; it all seems clear and powerful" (xiv).

Annie Dillard

DIGRESSIONS

"The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go" (xv).

Wordiness

"Don't use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine" (xiv).

STARTING OVER

"No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work's possibilities. In every work, there's an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later--some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with" (xvii).

Dillard, Annie. Introduction. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. Edited by Lee Gutkind, Norton, 2005.

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