Anne Lamott Summary

In the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, she writes an excerpt, Shitty First Drafts, which is about the impact and importance of the first drafts of writing. Anne explains at the beginning of this excerpt that all writers write shitty first drafts and the drafts get better as you write more and work on the writing more. Lamott claims that “writing is not rapturous,” she explains that the only way that she can write anything well is to write a very bad first draft and just work on fixing that.

She explains that sometimes you just have to type and get your ideas written out to be able to write a good piece of work.

Once someone has been writing for so long, they have to have the ability to be able to just trust their writing process and understand that the first draft isn’t going to be perfect. Nothing is perfect on the first try, you have to keep working at it.

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Sometimes the first draft will be the worst thing someone thinks they have ever written, but they just have to go back to it and try to make it better and revise what is wrong. A writer has to start somewhere and they work from there.

Just because the first draft is a bad draft doesn’t mean that the final work will be terrible. The first draft is the terrible draft, the second draft is the slightly better draft that has been picked through lightly to better, and the final draft is the “dental draft.

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The dental draft is the draft that you really pick through and make sure that everything is perfect. In other words, the final product is checked “dentally” to make sure that it is “healthy” so that the final product is perfect. Lamott’s entire excerpt is just explaining that whether or not your first draft is perfect or not, the final product will definitely be better and more acceptable.