Go with the Flow, But Ask Where it’s Going

“Shitty First Drafts,” by Anne Lamott, and Ray Bradbury’s film both discussed their writing process. They talked about how writing should just flow, with there being no formula for success. We see this when Bradbury says “I don’t write the book, all these characters come to me and say ‘Listen to me’,” and Lamott talks about her “child’s drafts.” For Lamott, she starts by just writing whatever she thinks of, no matter the quality. She just lets it flow. Lamott knows that out of all the gibberish she comes up with, there will be something that works. She doesn’t spend days thinking about what she will write for her first draft; she spends days thinking about how she will improve her first draft. I think this method works best. It gives you a point to start at and to add to, instead of a bunch of jumbled thoughts that, for me, never seem to come together. Bradbury doesn’t say it outright, but I believe he followed this method as well. He says the characters write the book, but I think Bradbury means that he writes what comes to his mind first, then refines it in the character’s voices. I’ve tried writing this paper and the last discussion quiz using Lamott’s method and it works very well for me.

I also agree with many of the ideas in “How to Mark a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler, mainly that a reader should be having a conversation with the author. While I don’t annotate my books, I do ask myself questions while reading. I think that this helps me understand the author’s point of view and gives me a glimpse of his or her thought process. In “What the Best College Students Do” by Ken Bain, which I’m reading for LAS 122, they talked about how to study. The lesson was about how some students never really sat down and studied, yet received great grades. The reason that some could do this was that they didn’t stop thinking about the material once they left the classroom. These students constantly thought about how what they learned in class could be applied to what they encountered throughout their day. They seek to fully understand what they’re taught. They seek to not just memorize it, but to really learn it. This comes back to what Adler writes, that you shouldn’t just read, but read to understand what the author is trying to say. How you read makes the difference between memorizing and understanding the material. Having an understanding allows one to utilize that knowledge and to apply it to other subjects. Whereas, memorizing only allows you to recite the information, but you are unable to explain it well. Because of this, students that understand the material will do better in all their classes since the knowledge they learn in one maybe applicable in another.