How to Live in Draft Form
We’ve all experienced the sinking feeling that happens when one gazes upon the pearly white of a syllabus and sees the looming word “rough draft” and a due date. We’ve all felt the butterflies that come with midnight composing, the rush to just finish, and the paranoia that our draft is not good, will never be good, can’t be good. So, now, allow me to ask you to consider the following: why not just accept the draft and move in? I am asking you all to join me, to live within the draft or the drafting process, to bask in the glory of imperfection, and allow yourself to know that writing is never really done.
As Frank O’Hara reminds us in “Meditations on an Emergency,” “it is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.” What he really means is that appearances can be misleading—imperfections abound, so why not embrace said imperfection and find beauty in it? Why not simply take a run on sentence and run with it until you figure out a way to morph it into a beautifully comma-ed clause?
Free Writing/Brainstorming:
Drafting is the process of just getting things down on paper. Drafting is a way to make one’s ideas legible. Drafting is drafting, has different connotations than if you get drafted into the army per se. but still, I think a lot of people see “draft” and cringe. Drafting never ends. There is no such thing as a finished piece of writing. All we have are drafts. We must learn to love our drafts, the drafting process, the want to draft.
