Shitty First Drafts

In the piece “Shitty First Drafts”, Anne Lamott writes very comically about the process of writing and the assumption about how people think the writing process goes.  The assumption that Lamott refers to in the article is that all established writers are just constantly filled with endless talent and new ideas, and that every time they sit down to write a piece it just flows beautifully until poof…another masterpiece.  I think this assumption is one that is so prevalent because as readers, we never get to see anything but the finished product.  One does not pick up a writer’s book and see their “shitty first draft” along the revisions that they made.  When readers receive the author’s writings, they are finished, final.  What Lamott explains is that she believes that all writing begins with a rough draft.  She believes that in the beginning of the process writers just put down whatever is on their minds, absolutely anything that they can think of.  The next step according to Lamott is going back through and deleting or cleaning up everything in the original word vomit.  Then finally, authors go through their pieces one last time correcting all of the small minuet details, and then the work is finished.

Wikipedia allows us to access “shitty first drafts” by giving editors access to all of the edits that have been made to the site’s articles.  By doing this, it allows us to see the first original, “shitty” draft and know what has been done to it.