Shitty First Drafts              
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Wolran Kim
Read & Respond (Jan 2011)


"Shitty First Drafts" & "Perfectionism”
From Anne Lamott’s Bird by bird (1994) Anchor Books


        Anne shows us the suffering of writing by quoting Vonnegut’s words. He said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” Even a writer, who writes as a career, has a terrible time in front of a blank paper on the first job. The shitty first drafts are always messed up. It ends only after a least a couple elaborations, and the process of straying aimlessly through the woods must be repeated again. No writers experience only pleasure from start to finish. They create a work completed at the best level, only through a process of refining ideas.

        Anne said that perfectionism will only drive us mad. I think perfectionism is a mistake from the expectation of the finished article to the burden from the beginning. It comes from the laziness which wants to eliminate the process of re-reading. Writing is a process of thought. Writing is an expression of ideas which are taken out of the mind. How confused and dazed are people’s minds? How many people can talk in an orderly manner with zero mistakes would say without a written speech? First drafts should be messy as a rambling bulldog would say. It is an operation to find the root of useful ideas which flash past and vanish every moment.

         Anne thinks our mind is the same as that suffering, when she chewed gum for the first time after her tonsillectomy. When painful memories from our childhood and disappointment and sorrow growing up, have not had a chance to heal and maturity is the result following suffering. We don’t know where to start, how to get off to a statement, and how deep we can touch our hearts on white paper. There is nothing we know for sure but the empty space on a blank file and keyboard. We are standing in a desert where we have never been, without a compass or navigation. We have to spill our minds on the first draft to find out who we are and why we are here, such as the children littering their rooms in search of toys. Pictures will not be able to start properly if we expect to complete perfect writing on the first draft.

        I have experience writing all day long like a crazy person in the beginning of writing poetry as a hobby. I was just happy that my poetry would listen to all my secret memories and feelings which could tell nobody. I enjoy the freedom of writing. There are papers and pens everywhere I go, so I can keep my sentiment and imagination flowing. Those are my first drafts and they are really messy. Poetry is born after a few processes of calibration, and some of them still remain unfinished. I often feel as if I’m eating my vomit as I read again and again. That suffering must be in the process to become mature, both in my writing skills and mentality. Everyone has their own separate ways, whether it’s a profession or a hobby. I wonder if the essence of creativity is free-spirited. The meaning of not knowing where we should go is that we can go anywhere. So the nameless fear in front of the blank paper is true freedom of our heart. One aspiring writer asked the professor, “How do I write well?” The professor answered, “Read all the books in the world and write something different from them.”  The story which only I can write……