Anne Lamott Bad First Draft Summary

What Anne Lamott is trying to convey in this excerpt is that every writer writes a bad first draft. No one can sit down and write the best novel, essay, etc. The objective of this passage is trying to convince people that it’s okay to not know exactly what you’re going to write, or everyone really does write first “shitty drafts”. People who write for a living don’t feel one hundred percent about their writing. They don’t sit down every day and know exactly what they are going to do. There is a process to their madness and having a bad first draft is going to be one of them. Lamott discusses that her own writing has terrible first drafts and sometimes looks nothing like the finish product. She talks about how she wrote a food review for a newspaper. She started off writing the meat of the review. She then went back and wrote down even more and more until she was finished. This is her way to persuade the readers. Basically, Lamott is trying to go against popular belief about writers and that they don’t have first drafts and know exactly what they are going to write. I do believe what she is saying. It is impossible to just sit down and write

This means that even if we are writing a fiction novel, newspaper article, college essay; everything comes from our childhood and our memories and has emotion involved. In high school we learned that we just have to write and it comes from doing research and rarely from our own ideas. Murray is also saying that when we read another person’s writing we can not disembody ourselves. This means that when we read or write we will always have a human emotion or reaction. I do believe that Murray is correct. We can’t do anything basically without it. Every single thing that we do will have some sort of human reaction or emotion connected to it. I will also be aware of other people’s writing and how they write from their past and their own