Reflection #1

In the four essays "Shitty First Drafts", "Why I Write", “For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day” and “To See Your Story Clearly, Start by Pulling the Wool over Your Own Eyes” authors discussed their different ways of writing. As a writer, you learn there are certain things you need to do to be to get all of your ideas out onto paper/onto your computer. The four writers Anne Lamott, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, and Kent Haruf each go through a process that helps them get the beginning of their creations out of their heads and onto paper or computer. Anne Lamott in her essay “Shitty First Drafts” says “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down.” She discusses in her essay basically that one shouldn’t correct themselves while writing their first drafts. First drafts are meant to just get all your ideas out onto somewhere before you lose them. If you correct yourself while doing your first draft, you end up losing your thoughts and lose the ideas that could have been something great. In Joan Didion’s essay “Why I Write” she states that “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of the object photographed.” Joan Didion speaks of how imagery helps her when it comes to her writing. The images give her the start of her stories. In “For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day”, Walter Mosley states that “If you want to be a writer, you have to write everyday.” In his essay he basically explains that writing everyday, anything, makes you a good writer. Getting any ideas out can help you. Even if you end up not being able to write, just rereading a past writing or correcting a misspelling in your writing can do some justice for that day. In the essay “To See Your Story Clearly, Start by Pulling the Wool over Your Own Eyes”, Kent Haruf says he writes his “first drafts blind on an old manual typewriter.” This helps him continue getting his thoughts onto that paper without the distraction of auto-correcting himself. It helps him get all his true original ideas onto that paper. Once he’s finished and can move on, he reworks from that first draft, expanding it. These authors each explain their different ways of writing and doing their first drafts, showing that each writer approaches this differently. Each one has their own unique way of getting their ideas onto paper, following their personalities.