Shitty First Drafts

      In the article Lamott mentions just filling your rough draft with all your thoughts then editing it later.  I find that I like to be a little bit more organized with my rough drafts and have trouble with wanting it to be too perfect.  I like that the author says that you should just start writing and not worry about stuff.   I found one part to be very helpful in easing my stress level when first writing a draft and that was the part in the article where it talks about how the first draft is the “get it down” draft and the second is the “fix it up draft”.   I think that approaching your drafts in this technique is a good practice because you wont be as worried about the quality of your paper.  Doing it in this way also let’s the writer focus on all the content that he or she wants to fit into the paper.  Knowing that the first draft is not what you will end up with makes it easier to just write all my thoughts down.  One part of the article I found very weird and not useful at all was the section where it discussed put all the voices in your head as mice in jars.  I don’t really have a problem with lots of voices in my head and I normally have a good focused idea of what I want to say. Because of that, I found that technique to be kind of ridiculous and not applicable for me.  The part where the author discusses school lunches is kind of confusing and I did not really get the point that was trying to be made.  I assume it was just talking about getting a lot of information about your topic so that you have a good amount of material to work with in your paper.  The section titled “polaroids” presented writing a paper is a new way that I found interesting.  The author compared writing a first draft to being able to watch a Polaroid develop.  This analogy is suggesting that you won’t know what your paper is going to look like until it all comes together.  This can be a bit scary if you are the kind of person that likes to know exactly what the plan for your paper is.  I feel as if I always have a good idea of how my paper is going to turn out.   But just like the author mentioned in the article, I sometimes think of something later that I had not thought of before that is perfect for my paper, like that of seeing the final image develop in a Polaroid.  Overall I feel as if this article was helpful when I approached the first paper assignment.  I did not worry as much about the first draft as usual and I just began writing down my thought.  Luckily my rough draft turned out much like I had planned but with even more information and content than I thought I would be able to write.