Words of Wisdom?

Anne Lamott's segment on 'Shitty First Draft,' in her book on writing, Bird by Bird, she describes the excellent detail of how far down the toilet a piece of writing is allowed to be because nobody is every going to care what it was like. Taken to heart, I could always look back on my first writings for anything and easily see the mountains of problems and complications that they had. I would always, consequentially, tend to delete (I can't say that I had too many essays that I chose to handwrite) the majority of the work seeing it as just plain, well, shitty. I've believed for a long time now that a first draft is never intended to be remotely perfect, but reading that Lamott puts it that it's actually intended to be bad is fantastic. If I think back far enough, if I ever thought my first drafts were anything but bad, I probably would have been much better off as the world's youngest genius a while ago. While I'm still working on the prodigy inside me, I do enjoy the idea that my first draft can be terrible. With no intentions of making it this way, of course. In my personal narrative, I do believe that I did not, in any form, achieve a perfect first draft. More than likely the only difference from Lamott is the fact that peer editing is going to happen and if I wrote, 'Well so what, Mr. Poopy Pants,' I may not be able to come to class without an amazing amount of embarrassment. Beyond that, though, I do like to know that this first draft isn't, by any means, my final draft. My piece isn't polished, and I feel that's what Lamott really wants to get across. There's an animated movie, by my favorite animator Hayao Miyazaki, called "Whispers of the Heart," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart_(film)) which depicts this concept perfectly by comparing the main character's first draft to that of a rock. The rock, however, hides a true gem inside of it that is needs to be cracked open and then polished. I've long felt that way towards my writing pieces after seeing the film. I'm always trying to polish the best gem ever for my writing, but I know that I'll always need to start with the rock first. Lamott's proposal that once you learn, you can pretty much trust the process, is true to the 'more or less' part. While you can learn and become a greater writer and enhance your pieces, no two pieces will ever be written exactly the same way. The statement, I believe, applies then to every writer out there. To keep writing is to keep improving. There will never be a single thing set in stone for any writing, no pun intended. However that stone is needs to be broken open to find the gems inside and polish a piece literature. Lamott worded it that all good writers write 'shitty first drafts,' and I couldn't agree more.