Throughout middle school and high school, this topic was one of the most repeated and conversed topic in mostly all classes, specifying the importance of drafts in our essays/papers/reports or even an assignment. Being told again and again the same thing, i started thinking to myself if i can ever be a good writer or not until i read George Dila’s “ Rethinking the shitty first draft”.
“Well, I can’t, won’t, and don’t write them.” I completely relate to and agree with the statement made by George Dila here who in my opinion is trying to portray the image that he finds it difficult writing a shitty draft in the first place to gradually reach perfection in his writing. While majority of the people might disagree with this unpopular opinion, i believe it depends and vary from person to person. For me personally, I feel like unless i revise my work again and again, I am unable to think of things and pen my thoughts onto paper.
Thinking of one instance where i found it almost impossible to adopt Anne Lamott’s approach was while i was writing my college application essay, commonly known as the “personal essay”. Almost all my peers, my counselors and my teachers told me to adopt Anne Lamott’s approach of initiating with what is called shitty drafts until you are satisfied enough with what you think is perfect.. Shitty drafts in my idea meant that for one, i really had no thoughts to pen down because of the fact that i was not revising what i wrote but also that gradually as i wrote it, i drifted away from the main idea of the topic.
Whether it makes sense or not, unless i revise my writing every couple of minutes as i am writing, i am unable to focus on it and it does not turn out to be as good as i want it to be. For this reason, I agree with George Dila and his idea of the first draft approach, which contradicts with Anne Lamott’s based on the idea of how one should go about to achieve perfection in one’s writing, according to which George Dila believes that to be a perfect writer, it is not necessary to go about writing a shitty draft in the first place and not really paying attention to the correct or incorrect in it, but to rather think over the sentences one pens down and consider his choice of words continuously throughout the process. As quoted by George Dila “In fact, I cannot even allow myself to write a shitty first sentence, let alone immediately follow the first with another few hundred shitty sentences. This does not mean that what flows from my brain through my fingertips through the keyboard and onto the monitor’s screen is exactly what I want it to be. In fact, I am a ruthless reviser, an eager re-writer. The difference between the way I write and the “let it all pour out” Lamott method is that I do exactly what she warns against— obsessively revising as I go along.”.