The blinking cursor of Microsoft word is a cruel master, outlined by the harsh desert of a blank page. This is how it feels when we must write, but no words come to us. This feeling, experienced by all writers at some point in time, has lead to the widespread misconception that some people are just great writers and others (those of us lost in the desert of the blank page), are not. In her piece “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lamott seeks to expose this notion as the damn lie that it is. The truth is, no one creates great work on a first draft. Accordingly, those of us who can ought to be despised. Her cure for a mental block when starting a writing is quite simple; write something… anything. If your first draft is going to suck anyway, why waste time agonizing over it. The real process of writing, she contends, is through a series of revision. Panning for gold in the muddy water of our first draft, if you will. If one expects to create a masterpiece in a single stroke, they will be staring down that blinking cursor for a very long time.
The “view history” tab on Wikipedia adds a unique dimension to the writing process. Where as normally one is almost never permitted to peek at initial revisions of a piece, merely the final polished result, “view history” shows us the whole story. By seeing how the article has evolved over time, the importance of a revision process becomes clear
No comments:
Post a Comment