Tres

Personally I think I have a problem with the whole idea of a rough draft. There’s nothing wrong with rough drafts in my opinion they just bother me because it’s terribly sloppy. I know that the first time you write something it isn’t going to be perfect and by all means it shouldn’t be unless you’re some sort of writing prodigy but I still have an issue with the concept of writing down nonsense that will never be incorporated into the actual piece that you’re writing. I tend to have a nasty habit of editing my work as I’m writing instead of simply getting all of my thoughts down and then going back and fixing things up. It gets the same results but oftentimes I tend to get off track and get lost in the editing that I forget where I was planning on going to next. I think that anyone who writes anything can say they’ve had the feeling where they’ve just sat down and known they’ve had to write and yet nothing comes to mind to write about. Sometimes I’ve been stuck in such a situation and I’ve been able to get myself unstuck by re-reading what I’ve already written or simply writing through the writer’s block by writing nonsense until an idea hits me or the writing juices simply start flowing again. In my own writing I’ve told myself to just start writing. ‘It’s only a rough draft,’ I’ll say to myself, ‘It’s supposed to be rough.’ And it actually does help to get all my ideas down onto the paper because then I can go off of that already written idea and write something that is even better. I think for this paper I might just write down all the elements that actually happened in the story and cut out the parts later that I don’t want. It would be like making a movie because the director doesn’t use all the footage that he films. He has bloopers and cut-scenes that no one ever sees because he didn’t want to put them into the movie. For some reason, that metaphor makes the idea of a rough draft make sense to me.

I assume that for informational or persuasive pieces this process might not be as valuable of a tool for a writer to use because those works tend to be more focused on facts and a pre-planned structure. It still is valuable to write a rough draft but writing rough drafts in the way that Lamott writes them seems to me to be more of a tool for creative writers to use to just get all their ideas down so they can be expounded upon later. For informational pieces the author would make an outline so that he/she knows which facts would go where and so the creative process of simply just writing would take a back seat to the already structuralized backbone of the essay that is the outline.

In her essay Lamott said that she trusted the system, more or less which kind of makes sense because in her mind she knows that it’s all going to work out in the end but being a writer she probably doesn’t like just writing down crap and then re-reading said crap and thinking, Jeez, this is crap. No writer likes that feeling that what they’re writing is not very good. So when trusting the rough draft system, she is trusting that whatever she writes will help her out when she comes back to it but doing it begrudgingly so because she knows that she’ll write substandard material in the present. At least that’s my take on it.