Me vs. The Blank Page

The blank page and I have always had a constant struggle. While everyone in class is writing away, I'm staring at the computer screen, trying to ignore all the fervently typing fingers tapping on the keyboards. My mind doesn't go blank; instead, millions of ideas start crowding my brain until I find myself going through all the multiple scenarios and paths I could possibly take when I finally decide to put pen to paper. I construct a perfect sentence, then a few more, then a paragraph or two until the entire story is written out in an organized little file in my mind.  Sounds great, right? Well, it is until I finally try sorting this file out on actual paper. A few sentences come out unharmed while the rest dissolve away, and then I start the thinking process all over again--the frustration builds.

Why did I go through and still go through this long, tedious, and frustrating strategy? Because, like Anne Lamott in "Shitty First Drafts," I had "fears that people would find my first draft before I could rewrite it" (Lamott 2). I didn't want teachers to correct all the mistakes that I knew I could fix. When I was in high school, I started my papers weeks before everyone else and still stayed up all night writing (not editing) the day before it was due. If a teacher had asked me to turn in a rough draft, I probably would have looked at them as if they were the crazy ones. A first draft? No. My sentences are perfect when I write them down. I had become such a perfectionist that I wouldn't allow myself to change a single word. How could I change what I had been constructing for so long in my mind? Getting my papers back with just a grade, a few vague comments, and a comma in the place it should have been didn't help the situation, either. As I was reading "An Overview of Conferring," I realized that, as teachers, we cannot just "fix or edit the student's writing." You could have put red ink all over my paper and that would have never helped me with my writing process. When we take the time to confer with students about their writing, we need to "teach the student one writing strategy or technique he can use in a current piece of writing and continue to use in future writing" (3). If someone had forced me to write a draft, I would have been annoyed but there's a chance someone could have helped me to make writing a progression rather than a sheet of paper I threw away after it was graded. I had no writing strategy other than "go through it in my head until I'm too frustrated to think anymore, then write it down."

When I got to college, I realized I couldn't write like this anymore.  I had multiple English classes, multiple novels, and multiple writing assignments. I learned pretty quickly I didn't have time to combine and recombine words in my head until the wires of brain began to fry. So, I started writing my first first-drafts. It was a struggle, but I realized that you must "start by getting something--anything--down on paper" (Lamott 2). Through trial and error, I found it was helpful for me to physically write my thoughts on notebook paper. There was something about typing that was too final, but writing with a pencil seemed perfectly harmless.  Whatever works, I told myself. As I began typing up what I had written down, more ideas began to flow; they came effortlessly.  Writing became cathartic rather than frustrating.  I had a teacher who once told me that writing into the night is one way to get an assignment done; but, if you want a piece of work you can be proud of then you need to finish with enough time to step away, forget about it, and come back with fresh eyes; and, if you want to create a work of art then you need to finish with enough time to do this several times. I finally learned a strategy to serve this perfectionist mind of mine.