Advice from Bird by Bird

After completing Bird by Bird the one thing that stuck with me and will continue to influence my writing is that I have to write a shitty first draft. Finding the words to get my point across is very difficult and challenging. Sometimes I just want to bang my head against my computer and see if something intelligent will come out but I have found that this rarely works. Her advice of just writing and not trying to make the first words perfect made me relies that I no longer had to bang my head. I can and should just write down whatever comes to my head no matter how crappy it sounds. Although if I do this I have to make sure I go back and edit it.

This advice has made me relies that no matter how hard I try my first draft is not going to be perfect and I am going to have to go back and edit it. It is not acceptable to hand in my shitty first draft which was a bad habit I had fallen in during high school. Out of all of her other writing tips this one affected me the most because of my lazy writing habits and that do not work for me. I would write a paragraph reread it right after writing it, see if it made sense and go on to the next one. That was my editing and it did not work, by not going back and editing the whole thing and making a new rough draft I didn’t get a picture of the entire thing. I couldn’t see if the story connected and flowed. I didn’t see writing rough drafts as part of the writing process.

The author of Bird by Bird made me understand that writing rough drafts was something a writer had to do to get to the final work. It was easy to connect with her because of the way she described and explained the process. She gave her own examples of how she a published writer, writes crap all the time. That it was ok to write crap and that it was part of the process. She said not to get hung up on finding the correct words just write whatever you thought as though you were writing a journal because if you did not you might miss the most important part. She gave this advice in a blunt telling you the truth even if you don’t want to hear it way. The way she described the first rough draft as shitty, made it really easy to connect with her and want to listen to her. Her use of blunt humor, her own personal writing experiences, and perspective allowed me to easily connect with her. I now understand that it is ok to write shitty and that it is in fact a part of the writing process. I no longer will sit at my computer trying to come up with the perfect words until I get so desperate and bang my head on the keyboard hoping inspiration will strike from the gibberish that comes out.