Introduction to Composing as a Process Summary
When writing, it’s easy to obsess over the final product. Ideas run through our heads before our pens ever touch a paper, or our fingertips a keyboard; as we realize these ideas, crystallizing them in words, we sometimes get hung up on little things. It’s important, then, that we zoom out and see the bigger picture — to see writing as a process. In the end, an excellent product is not without its history of revisions and do-overs.
Freewriting Summary
Throughout the writing process many find themselves barely able to communicate their thoughts. Unlike a conversation, a piece of writing has had much more time to collect itself and appear more sophisticated; it has the ability to change before final publication or print. Freewriting imitates the spontaneity and irreversibility of dialogue between people or even with oneself.
Shitty First Drafts Summary
To write a shitty first draft is to take the first and most laborious step in writing. You need the proper mental preparation to truly isolate yourself in the writing mind field. From this point on it would be advisable to simply scrawl out your thoughts in a stream of consciousness. The focus is never to “nail it” on the first try, but to get the ideas all drawn out; as soon you’ve finished that “first draft,” had a breather, it’s time to [figuratively] paint the town red. The first draft can be thought of as an ore deposit, and the second draft the extracted material.
Response
We often can get quite hung up on how to start an essay. Even still there is nothing quite as frustrating as not being able to break that initial mental block, discovering that there is but half the class period left to finish. With the freewriting approach, we are encouraged to just do it, to quit bottling up thoughts inside our heads and get something out onto that paper. But even when we finally put out, we end up correcting thoughts and sentences as they come, sucking up time and energy. I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the first try usually won’t cut it, so just make it as crappy as possible so long as there’s something in there.