"The fantasy of the uninitiated" is describing people who are not writers and think that writers have it easy and can sit down, first try, and create a perfect story their first draft. Anne Lamott is saying that, that is not true. All writers write first, second, and third drafts and though the finished book or story is perfect it took them a few times to get it right. Everyone writes shitty first drafts, it’s how you better your story to become something great.
Lamott says that she eventually let herself trust the process, more or less. The more or less is meaning that she lets herself go with her writing, that she always writes too much, maybe it’s a bad thing, but that way she can go through and erase and correct and limit all of what she has already written and make it better and better. She had to trust herself in that she needed to stop worrying about it being perfect and just let her fingers do the typing. I think that this not only applies to her but that it applies to most writers. I’m sure most writer’s, get anxiety about writing a good review or a good book and tend to over think the process of writing when she lets herself go but isn’t writing about nothing, she’s getting a good story with honest opinions.
I think writing the first, shitty draft is about the product and the process, the process is obviously very important in that the process is what it takes to write it and that means that writing a shitty first is benefiting the product of the whole thing. But overall I would say the process is more important because a good long process leads to a great product. I do agree with this for my first drafts, my first drafts almost always suck, but it takes those shitty first drafts to improve the story and make it better and better.
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