First Draft?

“this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated.”

-Anne Lemont

My perception of prolific writers like Hemmingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was that, some sort of divine inspiration guided their pens. Lemont in her essay states that society tends to believe authors first drafts end up becoming their masterpieces. That heavy tomes in the library which I could barely pick up, were written with ease. That works like Grapes of Wrath, The Color Purple and Atlas Shrugged were produced out of an excellent first draft. Through my experiences as well as Lemont’s this is quite the contrary. 

Writing literature of any kind takes more then a first draft. The notion of hundreds of iterations of a work is simply unfathomable to many who are not accustomed to writing. Many in society are under the impression that writers just stretch there fingers and type away creating a Pulitzer Prize winning novel just from their first draft. Though I many wish the process to be this simple in real life, it rarely is. For me, I write everything that comes to me. I view the first draft as a source to find raw ideas and phrases that are jumbled up together. Writing my raw thoughts on paper allow me to rearrange them as well as cut and add details that enhance the story. Then I take these changes and start my 2nd draft that is more focused and organize my sentiments.

First drafts serve as a starting point. It many times will be incoherent, ungrammatical and disorganized; however all your ideas are on paper. Similarly imagine a garden with beautiful flowers amidst a jungle of weeds. A gardener simply has to eliminate the undesirable weeds, rearrange and add a few new vibrant flowers. Almost everything in the garden was originally present. The gardener just edited the region to look nice. This represents the transition of the first to the second draft. A “shitty first draft” allows for the writer to freely express their thoughts, not having grammar etc to concentrate on. This shitty first draft is the raw material that over a period of time will become a piece of art. This is a process that takes time and perseverance. This is the process that even epic writers must go through.