Author: Daniel Wen (Page 1 of 2)

“Rewriting is when playwriting really gets to be fun. . . .In baseball you only get three swings and you’re out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you’ll hit the ball.”
This quote really stood out to me not only because I agree with Murray but also because it is a interesting way to think of rewriting like that. In most cases as Murray said rewriting can go indefinite meaning it can go on and on until you perfect everything you have so much time that you can organize however you want, your grammar and basics like that the more mistakes you make the more rewriting you will have to tend to do. Just because you have to do more rewriting doesn’t mean that you are bad at it, no one can perfect a essay, book, lyrics, in matters of days it takes a lot of rewriting so this quote really stood out to me.
“Rewriting is the difference between the dilettante and the artist, the amateur and the professional, the unpublished and the published.”
I agree with what Murray says here because rewriting something can make a big difference. If you never rewrote let’s say a book you would have many mistakes and the readers would have a hard time reading let only focusing or hooking onto it compared to if someone rewrote it 3-4 times it would be more interesting to the reader and they won’t have to struggle to understand what the book is trying to tell them.
“Most writers accept rewriting as a condition of their craft it comes with a territory. It’s not, however, seen as a burden but as an opportunity by many writers.”
I agree with this quote because I used to think and a lot of people think that rewriting can be a big hassle because you have to reread your essay or the work you wrote find mistakes and fix them and rewrite the whole thing with corrections. However yes it may take a lot of time sometimes it has a huge impact on it.
1)Internal revision is basically what your trying to put in your writing, what your gonna say and when to put this and when to write that it’s more focus on the writing itself. External revision is kind of like what the writer wants the reader to understand or pick up on when they read it.
4)For me personally I feel as revision is a opportunity to not only fixing your error but a step closer to perfection. As he said song writers have rewritten their lyrics or even changed some of them many many times to make it sound good and get the message across the people that listen to it without revisions it would sound like a total mess and this goes with everything like books, essays, documentary, etc.

“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page.”

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

“Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. ”

Lamott says that the first draft is more of a process. She continues to explain that it is more of you just writing down your ideas and to get it done with. I can relate to this because whenever I am writing a first draft I tend to just keep writing whether it’s useful or not I just put it that way I won’t have to stop and think whether I want to include that on later drafts. It can somewhat relate to the first quote above from Lamott “You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page.” I tend to do exactly that whenever I am writing about a topic, whatever comes to my mind whether it’s a good or bad thing about the topic. Lamott also mentions that the second draft is suppose to build upon draft one for example, I stated how draft 1 is more of your ideas and really unorganized however draft 2 is when you sort it out and see where you place this and that. Which also means that the 2nd or final draft is more about the product and how good it is like grammar, facts, organization, neatness, etc.