Anne Lamott: "Until They've Done It"

 

"Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it."

~Anne Lamott

    This quote is funny! And also very inspirational; a good phrase to remember when one's feeling doubts about a project. And personally, I think this marvelous quote can be applied to every part of the writing process, not just one.
    During the plotting of a story, a writer thinks up the basic ideas and tries to graph it all out, either in their mind or on paper. During this period, some ideas can sound too crazy or too random to work well, and it can be difficult every now and then to finding ways to connect two events in the story together ("now how does the main character get from their epiphany to the climax scene?"). There could be a whole lot of plot holes and unknown factors in this planning stage, like what a character is actually like when they're written, and this could make the story seem skeletal. But this is okay, because the plotting stage isn't the final result, but the launching pad for the next steps, the time to go crazy with "what ifs."
    Then there's the first draft stage of writing. While writing this draft, it can seem like everything's a mess in comparison to how beautiful it was while imagining it; but fortunately this isn't a disaster because the first draft is supposed to be that way! It's the draft meant for walking the grounds of the story for the first time, getting an insider's view of who the characters actually are, what the scenery is like, and which actions work well in the story. It's the discovery draft, and discovery expeditions can come across a couple unexpected finds before reaching what they were seeking in the first place.
    After the first draft is done, the rewrites (or the editing stage) can happen. And this might be even more difficult than the first draft, because now a writer has the task of bringing change to factors in the story that need improvement without changing things that were actually done well. But throughout this whole stage of the process, the question of "Which changes are the right ones?" is always there, and very pressing because no one wants to accidentally get rid of something good. Making those decisions can seem blind sometimes (a really frightening thought), but the revision stage is more than just taking things out; it's putting more things in, making additions. It's as much as a creative process as plotting the story and writing the first draft was, and this means that new awesome things can be created in the revisions.
    So in every area of writing, this quote by Anne Lamott can be applied and used to give encouragement. Do you agree? :)