Greetings, dear readers! I am doing a series this month in which I will write one post every Wednesday about writers saying memorable things about writing. I hope this will give you a greater insight into the world of authors, poets, playwrights, and other members of the writing breed.

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

This first quote about writing is by Anne Lamott, an author of both fiction novels and nonfiction books. I love it because it captures the frustrations and struggles of all writers, especially the young, up-and-coming ones. Many people may think that writers have some sort of innate ability to write brilliant stories and perfect poems on the first try, forgetting that the great successes in any field got to be that way through practice and tenacity.

Few, if any, notable writers are masters right from the start. Even the greatest novels, poems, shorts stories, play scripts, and screenplays started out as rough drafts that required countless hours of polishing and revision. For example, George Lucas’s script for Star Wars went through at least four drafts before production on the movie started, and Lucas continued to hack away at the piece during almost the entire filming process. The first draft, though very creative and original in its own way, is almost completely unrecognizable next to the finished product.

Daguerreotype taken by Edwin H. Manchester on November 9th, 1848. {{PD-1923}}

Another great example of rough beginnings is Edgar Allan Poe, whose first professional foray into creative writing, an anonymously published collection entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), failed to receive any contemporary critical or commercial attention. It wasn’t until the publication of his third book, Poems (1831), that Poe was able to write for a living, and he didn’t become a household name until he wrote “The Raven” thirteen years later.

I know from my own personal experience that nothing can make a writer laugh harder than rereading a first draft. Here is an excerpt from the rough draft of The Bully Buster, transcribed exactly as I wrote it in my now-tattered notebook: “At first, I thought becoming a superhero was a good idea, but then I thought ‘realisticly’, as my dad says. How could a weak, puny 5th grader become a heroic superhero?”

While I shouldn’t be too hard on myself–I was twelve years old when I wrote this, after all–it still cracks me up to read the spelling and punctuation errors, simplistic structure, and redundant ending of this brief snippet from the first draft of my novel. If this doesn’t prove that aspiring authors don’t have a rough go at it their first time around, I don’t know what will.

Although I used the quote from Anne Lamott apropos of the realm of writing, it applies to almost any part of the human experience. Wherever your path takes you, it’s helpful to remember your rough beginnings.