Passing the Shitty First Draft Stage

After reading Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" and "Perfectionism," I felt much better about my writing. I often begin by writing the worst first draft as well. My first draft is always much longer than the maximum assigned pages because I repeat myself, I ramble, I include unnecessary information and I just keep writing. I do this not only with essays but with emails, text messages and any form of writing. I realized the reason my essays stay shitty is because I often do not go past the first draft. I get frustrated about how bad my first draft is and I usually only fix it slightly and hand my piece in. I also realized to write several drafts, I need to be more time efficient and start writing my drafts in advance. Writing concisely is one of my weaknesses so I think the processing of writing several drafts to narrow down and cut down my ideas will be very helpful.

I also really enjoyed the piece on perfectionism. While I would not call my self a perfectionist, the critical voices of other people definitely bother me. I always feel as if I have to please everyone and I definitely agree that I am harsh on myself. It is very true that I am much nicer and more constructive reading a friend's paper than reading my own. I loved when Vonnegut explains, "When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth" (32). Sometimes I really wonder how I am able to write so poorly. Although the crayon in the mouth image seems so bizarre, often times, my writing probably looks like someone crazy wrote it. I often look over my first draft and wonder why my seemingly good idea turned into such crap. I hope that by having a word limit and by editing my drafts, my essay will turn out decent enough to pass the shitty first draft stage.