$#!++y First Drafts

One of the lessons I'm trying to learn is how to write effectively. Having a schedule full of activities, as mentioned in my previous post, doesn't help. But more to the point, I'm trying to unlearn what I used to do in school as a writer and learn what I should be doing instead.

For example, in school, I used to sit in front of an empty computer screen with that damned cursor blinking . . . blinking . . . blinking . . . waiting for me to write something, anything, that would break up that field of white. Every writer faces the daunting challenge of a blank page but my problem was how I went about filling it. Instead of spewing out ideas and getting them on the page, I crafted complete sentences in my mind, honing them and trying to get them perfect before setting my typing hands to work.

I'm learning now that that's not sustainable. I lost too many good ideas because I couldn't get them into the right form. Getting everything perfect before I write doesn't work. It leaves me frustrated because my progress is too slow, and it leaves me twice as frustrated because someone's going to carve up my work - which I thought was a masterpiece - with a red pen anyway.

The most effective way to write, according to Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, is to "write really, really shitty first drafts." She explains:

The first draft is the child's draft, where you pour it all out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of your characters wants to say, "Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?," you let her. . . . Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.

So that's what I'm trying to do. Ah Toy is not going to converse with Mr. Poopy Pants, but I am trying to get all my ideas down on the page without the added pressure of getting it right the first time. As a result, most of my first draft is average at best.

There are, however, a couple paragraphs I've written that have pleasantly surprised me. They still need work and a lot of red pen marks to get them to really sing, but here's a passage I don't mind sharing with you. It describes the end of Ah Toy's journey from China and her entrance into San Francisco Bay.

Once they slipped through the mouth of the bay, Ah Toy must have been amazed at the land surrounding her. “The entrance is about a mile wide,” wrote Robert Smith Lammot when he, too, entered the bay in 1849, “each side rising in a rocky bluff two or three hundred feet high covered with green moss, with a fine depth of water.” Anne Willson Booth agreed, describing the bay as “very pretty” with scenery “of the boldest character.” On their left they passed a series of islands and rocks. Ribbed, green Angel Island rose regally to the north. A cluster of small rocks, teeming with sea birds, were defiantly planted in the middle of the bay, forcing ship traffic to tack left or right. These were Harding, Shag, and Arch rocks, no longer visible above water today due to a 1901 dynamiting campaign to clear the way for ship traffic, but very much obstacles to be reckoned with in 1849. Farther on, the ship passed Alcatraz Island, “The Rock” as it would become known in its prison days of the 20th century. It was “so arid and steep,” recorded Juan Manuel de Ayala, who sailed the first ship into San Francisco Bay in August 1775, that “there was not even a boat-harbor there.” Lush, verdant Yerba Buena Island, nicknamed Goat Island for the number of goats pastured there, stood ahead. Its manmade current day neighbor, Treasure Island, was not even a gleam in city planners’ eyes.

As they continued into the bay, Ah Toy scanned the skyline for a sign of civilization: streets, buildings, other ships, anything. There was nothing. The green, grassy Marin Headlands rose to their left and windblown sand dunes clumped to their right, but no hint of a city, town, village, or even a single tent. Someone had spotted an old building close to the shore and pointed at it excitedly, but some of the crew had chuckled. It was only the rundown presidio, the Spanish military outpost, sagging from the weight of decades of inconsequence. Nothing there nor anywhere resembled gold. The other passengers’ expressions betrayed confusion and anxiety. Maybe this was the wrong entrance? Was this just a quick stop to load up supplies? Did they get blown off course? She glanced at the captain but his face didn’t give anything away except a smile that meant something completely different, and the rest of the crew was hustling about the ship as it always did. This journey was beginning to look like a mistake.

So there you have it, your first "shitty" preview! Maybe it makes it into the book, maybe it doesn't. But if nothing else, it saves me from the awful blank page with its hellish blinking cursor.