Like Anne Lamott Says

"Chapter 6 is all typed and tidied and there's no evidence from what you'd read that it was a nightmare to write and that I had no idea what was happening paragraph to paragraph, or felt like I was making it up as I went along (a terrible thing for an author to feel)."
-Neil

"What?" You say, "Why is the quote from Neil Gaiman if you're talking about Anne Lamott?"

Because I wanted to see if you'd catch it. I'm in that kind of mood today.

No, actually (though the mood thing is accurate) it's because both writers have written about the same thing. When I was deciding on a handout to give my Comp. 101 class today, I briefly considered giving them a chapter from Anne Lamott's book Bird By Bird called "Shitty First Drafts" (i.e. how they're a good thing). In the end, I thought it best to go with another chapter instead, but I did consider it.

This week the class is working up to giving me the final draft of their first formal assignment (due Friday with all the trimmings: brainstorm notes, rough draft, etc.). Today I handed back the copies of their rough drafts which I commented on. I was surprised by the levels of anxiety some students showed about those comments. I had to remind a few that there's a reason they're called rough drafts. There's a reason why revision is important. First you write it, then you fix it, then you make it pretty.

It occurs to me sometimes, largely depending on what I'm writing, that there are times when the messier your rough draft is, the better. If your aim is to make it messy, then when your inner heckler starts speaking up, you can just tell them, "Yeah, I know it's a mess. It's supposed to be. I'm doing this exactly right, so shut up." Liberating. Then your heckler shuts up, your subconscious speaks up, and delightful and unexpected things are more likely to slip in.

Still, I decided on a different reading for my Comp. students. Most of them struggle with the opposite of what a lot of the writers I know struggle with - most of the students I have are struggling with reigning themselves in and focusing on the fact that writing is about communication and that a large amount of freedom in an argumentative essay isn't always a good thing. Thus, the decision on handouts.

Now I seem to have wandered away from my original point (so the heckler informs me). Or, have I? Maybe it's just all very meta, have you thought about that?

In the end, we come back to this idea of the happy medium. Messy is good. Cleaned up and pretty is good too. How to reconcile? Therein lies the beauty of revision.

I'm curious, how "shitty" do your rough drafts tend to be? Do you find you write with different levels of messiness depending on what you're writing? Why? How? How does it all work itself out once you start revising?