Forging ahead with shitty first drafts.*
*Oh, and that's a good thing...
Today's Tidbits: This morning, I felt compelled to return to Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994). She has this chapter whose title all of my writer friends know by heart: "Shitty First Drafts." It is incredibly helpful to have a writer of Anne Lamott's talent not just remind us, but INSIST that every writer--even the very best--begins each new project by writing a shitty first draft.
"You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, 'Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,' you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would have never gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go--but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages."
Very comforting...