When students must write an essay they often struggle with the starting process of coming up with the idea and once they’ve even done that they may struggle with figuring out how to start it. This makes writing the first draft the hardest, especially for inexperienced writers, for example student writers, who often feel like they’re expected write perfectly the first time. First drafts are the first version of a paper that someone has written, with the number of drafts varying depending on the writer and when they feel that they’ve accomplished what they want to with that piece of writing.
Anne Lamott’s article Shitty “First Drafts” writes about how important first drafts are in her revision process, and describes her personal process of writing. Also, Doug Downs’ article “Revision is Central to Developing Writing” helps further the importance of first drafts, and even further the revision process. The mentality that we must write amazingly the first time around, relates to Keith Grant-Davie’s idea of constraints from his article titled “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents”, because as we’ll see, the first drafts are where our minds flow freely, giving us enough ideas and topics to sculpt a piece of writing from later.
Lamott writes about how when she first starts writing, she can get caught up on the fact that she doesn’t have a clear idea of what she ultimately wants to focus on. For her to overcome this initial hurdle she starts “by getting something–anything–down on paper” (Lamott 530), and goes from there. This is because, as Downs puts it, “while writing, writers usually find something to say that they didn’t have to say before writing. (Downs 66)
When we start writing a piece of text we often don’t know what to ultimately write towards or sometimes to even write about. However, the act of simply putting any ideas we have on paper, allows the writer to let their ideas “all pour out and then romp all over the place” (Lamott 528). Meaning that we must first put anything down on paper, with no limit on how much one writes. Then when we go back through and reread it, we can usually find the pieces that we like. From these bits and pieces, we can finally see the purpose.
This can be illustrated by how Downs relates writing to the headlights a car as one drives, “The headlights reach only a fraction of the way to the destination; a writer can only begin writing what they “see” at the beginning” (Downs 66). This means that we can only know so much about where our writing is going until we begin writing. However, once one reaches the ‘“end of the headlights’ first reach––writing the first draft––lets the headlight now illuminate the next distance ahead” (Downs 66).
This means that now that a first daft has been written the writer should hopefully have a new and better ideas of what they want to do next as they revise. This appears to show that writing is constantly evolving as the ideas of the writers themselves are changing with new insights and knowledge. This far we’ve seen that first drafts are important in the sense that they let us initially put any ideas we may have down on paper, so we may later go back and edit from this material that we provide ourselves.
Since it’s important for writers to understand the need of first drafts, if someone, such as a student, struggled with this step then it could lead to huge issues later. This issue arises for students when they worry too much about the grades that are inevitably attached with their writing. This makes it hard to write a first draft, especially since they know it would be terrible, and since they can’t uncover this first reach they’ll never “illuminate the next distance ahead” (Downs 66). Meaning they will fail to see what possibilities lie in the future for their writing if they are unable to overcome this problem.
Since writing a first draft is necessary to uncover more ideas and further the path one takes when writing, one could now see how troublesome it would be for someone, for example a student, if they struggled with writing a first draft. In Grant-Davie’s article he describes constraints as “other factors in rhetorical situations, besides rhetors and audiences, that could help or hinder the discourse… Constraints could arise from the immediate and broader contexts of the discourse… other people, or factors in the cultural, moral, religious, political, or economic climate” (Grant-Davie 357).
Constraints must come from places other than the writer and the audience, and it may come from certain norms that societies might have, and they must affect how a writer writes, either positively or negatively. When Lamott talks about how she would “worry that people would read what [she’d] written” (Lamott 529) in her first draft, her worry is coming from the culture that surround professional writers. That being that professional writers should know how to write properly, with accepted conventions, such as grammar.
Since it’s more of the society’s overall norms, the writer can become constrained to follow a set path in what they feel they can write. If someone failed to write a first draft which leads them to new discourse and ideas, then it would hinder their goal. This fear of not writing perfectly, which in this case the norms imposed come from a classroom setting, is explained well by Brookes and Carr in their article “Failure Can be an Important Part of Writing Development” (Brookes, Carr 63).
They say that, In the writing classroom, when assessment is tied too completely to final products, students are more likely to avoid risking failure for fear of damaging their grades, and this fear works against the learning process” (Brookes, Carr 63). Therefore, it’s necessary to sometimes allow one’s self to not worry about the usual conventions or writing, and let themselves fail so they may learn from their mistakes. This allows the writer to get any ideas down on paper, and worry about fixing errors later in the revision process. “I’d start by writing without reining myself in.
It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible” (Lamott 529). In this quote Lamott describes the start of her writing process, and how she would simply write just to get started and get any ideas on paper. This is because she finds that “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts” (Lamott 530). Therefore, when student constrain themselves from writing poorly initially they are hindering their ability to write properly, because no good piece of writing starts off perfect, or ever reaches perfection.
It appears that first drafts are one of the most important steps in writing, firstly because they help “illuminate the next distance ahead” (Downs) that the writer must take in order to reach a successful conclusion in that piece of writing. Further, writers, especially inexperienced writers, must learn to not limit themselves when writing these first drafts because of how much they uncover more ideas, and start the revision process. Overall first drafts have a very important purpose in everyone’s writing process, and that they must let run free as it may just help them realize what they’ve been wanting to say the whole time.
