After reading Anne Lamott’s article about writing first drafts, from my own experience as a writer, whenever I’ve written things in the spur of the moment. I find that more often than not, after writng things down in the spur of the moment, I end up going back through everything I wrote later on and revising it or completely omitting things because I realized afterwards that they didn’t exactly fit in with the story I was trying to tell or I had made some mistakes within the writing that I hadn’t noticed while I was writing in the spur of the moment. I’ve also had moments where I’ve experienced writer’s block and didn’t know what to write or just continued to make mistakes and erasing entire paragraphs, if not the entire paper, because of it. I’ve learned that making mistakes is a huge part of the writing process.
But after I had read George Dila’s response to Lamott’s article, I can also relate to what Dila had said. I also understand not being able to allow myself to write a shitty first sentence either. Which is why I continue to revise things after I have a spur of the moment idea that I write down once I’ve gotten everything out to make sure it’s as perfect as I can possibly make it. From my own experience, I can relate to Dila who described his writing process as: “When I have completed what some might call the first draft of the story, it will have already been revised hundreds of times. It will be a competent story at this point, but still open to some revision, to polishing, to “tinkering”. But it will not be shitty. It will not be a mess.” But sometimes I do make errors that I fix before ever consider myself done with any work that I’m writing. So, in short, I see where both sides are coming from with their arguments with my own experience in both situations.
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