First Draft

Anne Lamot’s style of writing a first draft is to flush out all her thoughts about the subject. This creates a lot of material that she can later expand on or remove. This is vastly different from George Dila’s version of the first draft which is to revise and rewrite until the draft reached the state of being good. I feel like I don’t really match either style of writing. I don’t produce enough opinions or thoughts to be able to have the style that Lamot uses, but I also don’t have Dila’s refusal to have a poorly written first draft. I am somewhere in between there styles of writing. I would frequently be staring at blank pieces of paper due to being unsure where to start. This first sentence would take about the same amount of time as one of my body paragraphs. This is what makes me similiar to Dila, who stated “In fact, I can’t even allow myself to write a shitty first sentence,” but the similarities end there. I am also similar to Dila in that I am fine with writing a bad first draft. I am just simply unable to write anything that comes to my head about the topic because nothing comes to my head. This makes me unable to have Lmaot’s style. An example of this is when I was writing my common application essay, I after expanding on my thoughts was at a meager 350 words compared to the 650 limit. This is also evident in my hate of papers with a required length due to me running out of good content to write about and being forced to fill my paper with bad content.