On Embracing the Messiness of Writing
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed or, even, God help us, healthy.
– Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts”
As I compose this blog post, I am reminded of a pivotal moment in my writerly development – the moment when I realized that everyone’s first drafts suck, and that it’s okay, and even good, to start with “shitty first drafts” on the way to writing better second and third drafts. It began when I was sitting in the communal grad student office, waiting for my grad student friend Tom, a fellow writing center tutor, to finish up a project so that we could get coffee. I was an undergraduate, so I was awed and intimidated by the word-nerdy lit, comp, and MFA graduate students who shared that large office and discussed ideas that went right over my head. While I waited for him, perched on a couch of dubious cleanliness, he threw a stack of stapled pages onto my lap.
I looked down at the front page, which had a title with at least three words I’d never seen before. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Read this for me,” he said, looking down and shuffling more paper on his desk.
I knew there was nothing of value I could offer to Tom – he was more advanced than me; therefore, everything he wrote must be brilliant. I figured that, like the rest of the graduate students, brilliance flowed from his fingertips when he sat down to write. I believed what Anne Lamott calls the “fantasy of the uninitiated.” Despite my protests, he insisted that it would help him if I read it for understanding – if there were places where I had questions or felt confused, chances are, other readers might feel the same way. Dutifully, I read his essay and marked thoughts in the margins, pushing aside the voice inside me that said I couldn’t help someone so far ahead of me, and it turned out that my thoughts were actually useful to Tom – they started a dialogue over coffee that helped him develop his paper.
He thanked me for reading his work and later sent me a copy of Anne Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts,”an essay from her book Bird by Bird. I read it, and it changed my understanding of writing for the better. In brief, amusing, and candid terms, she writes about how everyone’s first draft sucks, and that it’s okay. Those graduate students weren’t bastions of brilliance – they were writers who, like me, sometimes stared at the blinking curser on the screen feeling lost, sometimes both loved and hated writing at the same time, and they ultimately pushed through the tough stuff, using one another as a test-audience to help them think, compose, and communicate.
It is empowering to see, rather that just be told, that writing is a messy, time-consuming process for everyone – even seasoned, accomplished writers. I hope that Tom understood what a gift he was giving me in seeing me as a valuable reader who could help him work through his “shitty first draft.” As a writing teacher and a writing center administrator, I am now in a position to mentor many developing writers. I try to pass the message on to them in deed as well as in word – I write when my students write, and I share my writing challenges with them so that they understand that even people who do this for a living have to work at it, and that’s okay.
I’m excited to talk to you about mentoring writers during the Symposium, so let’s start the conversation here in the blog. I am interested in how you empower your students to see themselves as readers and writers whose thoughts matter. How do you show them that writing is a messy process, and how do you help them make peace with it? What resources do you use? How do you mentor?
1 thought on “On Embracing the Messiness of Writing”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Helping students realize their own writing ability is one of my favorite parts of this job. Writing is notoriously difficult (I am often rewarded with a groan when I tell people what I do). It is surrounded by anxiety and insecurity. I first make a point of telling my students that even so-called ‘expert’ writers often struggle with their writing. I may share a horror story or two of my own, like the time in graduate school when my Spenser professor told his entire class that if we turned in papers using any form of ‘to be’: is, are, was, were, etc., we would automatically receive a failing grade. After cursing him, I tried to write in this way, and was astonished at how much this one change improved my prose. The lesson is twofold: one is that every challenge is really an opportunity in disguise; another is that they will not be asked to do anything so difficult as this in my class; it could be worse.
Most of my mentoring takes place during office hours. While I encourage everyone to come and see me, every semester I have a few highly dedicated students who come not only to the required conferences, but also to many others. I welcome these visits, and will spend whatever time is necessary to ensure that these students get all the help they need and want. I often maintain relationships with my former students, providing feedback on future writing tasks and writing recommendations.
My favorite task is one I believe I have mentioned before. It’s particularly fun for breaking down a writer’s internal barriers; overachievers, I find, have particular difficulty accepting the concept of the ‘down’ draft Paula mentioned. Such students cling to the notion that they should be able to begin with the first word of a composition and end with the last, and that every sentence in its turn should be perfect on the first try. But writing is rarely linear–and it is never perfect. You cannot, at least initially, create and critique at the same time. Trying to do both simultaneously will paralyze you, particularly if the assignment is unfamiliar, lengthy, and/or difficult.
What I have them do is a kind of digital directed free write. On the computer, we all open a word document and shrink the page to the size of a postage stamp. This makes it impossible for students to read what they are writing as they write. Then we set a timer for around fifteen minutes and just let our fingers go. I complete this task with them, and at the end, I make the document large again so they can all see the mistakes I have made, and understand that this is normal. Then we create a second document and proceed to excise every useful word, thought, and phrase from the paragraph of free writing, arranging the bits into a kind of hierarchy that becomes, for most people, a kind of outline that they can then flesh out. Students are happily surprised when they realize that what seemed like a random collection of disorganized half-thoughts was actually the beginning of a viable structure for their paper. We may dilate, then, in the same way, on individual statements in the quasi-outline, developing them further.
I find this exercise gratifying because it is something students do entirely on their own, which gives them a badly needed boost in confidence. They often take it and run with it; on more than one occasion, I have run into old students who say this is still how they generate much of the material for their papers.