Rough drafts

My antipathy towards drafting has lessened as I've grown older. I no longer dread prewriting and have found drafting a brilliant way to put a stop to the common student evil of procrastination. Writing poetry also helped: I would write something and then minutes later, it would be covered in scribble marks.. x-ing out words and phrases, making changes, completely reorganizing the entire poem, etc. When I was done, I would have several copies of the poem with the changes and a final copy.

One day, I said to myself: "Hey look, you're drafting!" And I started to enjoy the process.

But writing essays is a completely different story.

Is that a pun? Honestly, (and this is embarrassing for a future English major) I've never understood puns and how they work. Guess I better get on that.

Anyway...

When I write rough drafts for essays, I expect them to be perfect the first time. While some people can just pull a draft out of thin air, I spend painstaking hours creating the best rough draft possible. But my rough drafts are never perfect and, in the past, whenever someone suggested a few changes, I was utterly heartbroken.

Over the years, I've grown more accustomed to criticism and the art of creating a rough draft. Now I can whip out a draft for a four to five page essay in approximately six hours. Instead of three to four days.

This week I spent a good deal of my time drafting. I had two papers due (one a draft and one a final draft), and both were about you know who.. Conrad, in all his splendid glory. When I wasn't writing/thinking about Conrad, I was daydreaming out the window. It was there I stumbled upon a thought about drafting. Hence, the subject of this entry.

I am a rough draft.

We're all rough drafts.

Rough drafts that God continually works on. We may strive for perfection but we won't reach it until the day we finally meet the great Author of our story. (Oh how corny of me.. I can't help it. I am completely corny by nature)

So we learn to take criticism and we keep working to that final draft: making changes, adding or taking away bits and pieces, choosing better words, and improving syntax. I take comfort in the fact that God is in control of all that.

Makes me proud to be a rough draft.