Blog Post 2 - Response to "Shitty First Drafts"

While reading this article, a few questions came to my mind that I wanted to try and answer. The first one was, why would Lamott be so self conscious about a bad first draft, even if no one is going to see it? My answer would be that as a writer, especially a professional one, your life’s work and your livelihood comes from an ability to express a particular idea you have, When you’re having a difficult time immediately tapping into that idea, I can imagine why that would be scary. Having to just churn something out, even if you have no slight clue of how to correctly word what you’re saying, would be extremely frustrating. Which leads into the next question I had, why is it so important to keep a first draft only to yourself? As a writer you are constantly putting some of your most intimate, sometimes private thoughts to the world, so it’s important to have the vocabulary be the most perfect you can in order to convey what you want to. It’s even important to word things a certain way, even when you want to leave your writing open to interpretation. That sort of pressure, I imagine, would stick with you, even when writing something not a soul in the world will see. So it would be extremely important to have a creative space completely to yourself, a place to explore and chip away slowly in order to find the difference between what it is that's for you, and what it is that you want to convey to the world.