Interesting — drafts
Holly commented that she found first drafts easier than rewrites and someone else wrote in and said they did, too. What do the other writers among you think?
I think getting down my main ideas is harder and then adding and subtracting to them is much easier. It’s a little like those logic puzzles, you know, the ones that say “Linda is wearing red” and “Pat is wearing a hat” and somehow you figure out which person is wearing which color of which piece of clothing. I love those logic puzzles — they make my brain hum nicely — and that’s how it feels for me to do rewrites. I have this main plot and I need to figure out how to best illustrate it. There are generally a million things I have to say but if I wander off too much, it stops making sense. So while I rewrite, I prune and shape, add some breadth and depth, and it gives me the same physical satisfaction as weeding a garden.
The biggest problem I have with this draft is that it isn’t casual enough. I’m trying to let myself relax in the way I do while I write my blog. Sure, I want to pretty up my writing and make sure my grammar is correct but I want my voice to come through and it didn’t as much as I would have liked.
I’m trying to figure out how to show not tell, which is very difficult because I’m talking about specific thought processes here. This particular chapter is about coming to a resolution and most of the work there was happening in my head. I’m trying to find a way to use poetic license and create some events that maybe didn’t quite happen that way to give this more weight.
For me, the first rough draft and then the beginning of the revising are really difficult. At some point when I’ve got the revisions started I feel like I’m in my groove and things get somewhat easier from there. But the beginning is usually *really* hard for me.
I find the first draft to be the most difficult as well, I find revisions much, much easier.
First draft is hard hard hard. Going back after the first draft too soon is hard as well. But I’ve learned how to let things sit now. Then I can go back and make it better.
First drafts don’t particularly bother me, but I have to choose my location for writing that draft carefully. If I’m at home, it might take me 6 hours to write 750 words, and it’s agony the whole time. If I’m at the coffee shop, or locked in an empty classroom at my son’s school, I can do 750 words in two hours.
I take re-writes as a personal insult.
My writing is mostly confined to research articles for ecological journals, but I find the first draft far, far easier than the rewrites.
But this is only after I read Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” and accepted her concept of “shitty first drafts” (sorry, but that’s how she phrases it). Allowing myself to do a “shitty first draft” at least gets the words down on the paper, but the rewrites are still hard for me.
but what’s hardest for me is rewriting after a reviewer has opened a vein of snark on what I’ve written, and rather than objectively reviewing the merit of my work, has taken the opportunity to show me how smart he is and how dumb I am.
this happens more often in the sciences than I would like to believe. And it’s not just me; colleagues have complained about the same thing.
Rewriting is worse than first drafts, but the hardest thing for me is submitting my work for criticism. I tend to take any critical remarks as evidence that I suck and am wasting my time trying to write (and somehow, I often overlook the positive remarks…)
I find the first draft easy. It’s the re-writes and fine tuning that I find more difficult. The ideas flow without much trouble at all. The difficulty comes when I have to break it down to the “parts” that are necessary to fulfil the goal of the project.
Just my own 2 cents…
-d