After reading “Shitty First Drafts” my view on the writing process as a whole has changed. Normally when I write, I try to make it as close to perfect as I can without going through the painstaking process of writing multiple drafts unless it’s a very important paper and I have a head start. Lamott’s process of writing a draft that gets all the ideas and stupid thoughts out of her head is foreign to me. When I start to write a my ideas are all over the place and I cherry pick what I can string into a coherent paper. Similarly to my own writing process Lamott freaks out about her own work midway through. I can’t think of a time when writing has been 100% calming and relaxing for me, it’s always been rushing towards due dates, doing majority of the work on the fly. While that was effective for work in middle and high school, I think college writing requires a different approach. I would like to adopt at minimum Lamott’s way of getting all her ideas on paper. Getting the ideas out on paper and weeding out the ones that don’t fit seems like a good thing to add to my writing process. In a way it’s just natural selection at work; the inferior ideas and words are culled until I produce at least to my standards, a masterpiece.
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