This week I am going to continue to discuss Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird. I have read this book several times and it, along with Natalie Goldberg’s books, informs a lot of my writing style.

I could probably write a blog on every page of this book. Right now, the ancecdote on my mind occurs on page 86 when her editor tells her the second draft of her novel isn’t publishable, and that while he liked the characters, there seemed to be nothing going on. He said. Lamott writes, “I had in effect created a beautiful banquet but never invited the reader to sit down and eat. So the reader went hungry.” She goes on about how she panicked and couldn’t understand where he was coming from. She revisited the story and agonized over then resubmitted to the agent. Again, he said it didn’t work, and that sent her spiraling into a drunken binge. When she woke up from the bender, she was angry that three years’ of work was being dismissed by someone who obviously didn’t get it. So she went to her agent’s house and, to use Lamott’s words, “pled her case.” What she actually did, clutching her manuscript to her chest was tell the story she had written, or had meant to write, and the agent said to her, “I want you to write that book you just described to me. You haven’t done it here.”

I think this is a common stumbling block for writers and a universal fear of self-reflective writers. We skip parts that we think may be too obvious because we think we are being condescending to readers by leading them by the nose through our world. The essence of writing is knowing what to include and what to leave out. I think this anecdote could make the case for just losing any type of editing or filtering when writing your first draft. Just write EVERYTHING.  You can cut later, but you won’t have to make assumptions about what the reader knows. Of course, this is easier said than done. We naturally have filters and we naturally edit as we go. My method of writing a first draft is once the initial writing session of a project is done, when I go back for the second session I will read the draft from the beginning. Naturally, as I do that, I am catching errors and editing. For longer projects I might go back to the beginning of a chapter instead of rereading the entire novel. So my completed “first drafts” aren’t really that raw because I have gone over all but the latest writing several times already. Of course, everyone does this differently, and this may not work for you. Do whatever it takes to finish something. Keep writing, my friends.