Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed or, even, God help us, healthy.

– Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts”

As I compose this blog post, I am reminded of a pivotal moment in my writerly development – the moment when I realized that everyone’s first drafts suck, and that it’s okay, and even good, to start with “shitty first drafts” on the way to writing better second and third drafts. It began when I was sitting in the communal grad student office, waiting for my grad student friend Tom, a fellow writing center tutor, to finish up a project so that we could get coffee. I was an undergraduate, so I was awed and intimidated by the word-nerdy lit, comp, and MFA graduate students who shared that large office and discussed ideas that went right over my head. While I waited for him, perched on a couch of dubious cleanliness, he threw a stack of stapled pages onto my lap.

I looked down at the front page, which had a title with at least three words I’d never seen before. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Read this for me,” he said, looking down and shuffling more paper on his desk.

I knew there was nothing of value I could offer to Tom – he was more advanced than me; therefore, everything he wrote must be brilliant. I figured that, like the rest of the graduate students, brilliance flowed from his fingertips when he sat down to write. I believed what Anne Lamott calls the “fantasy of the uninitiated.” Despite my protests, he insisted that it would help him if I read it for understanding – if there were places where I had questions or felt confused, chances are, other readers might feel the same way. Dutifully, I read his essay and marked thoughts in the margins, pushing aside the voice inside me that said I couldn’t help someone so far ahead of me, and it turned out that my thoughts were actually useful to Tom – they started a dialogue over coffee that helped him develop his paper.

 He thanked me for reading his work and later sent me a copy of Anne Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts,”an essay from her book Bird by Bird. I read it, and it changed my understanding of writing for the better.  In brief, amusing, and candid terms, she writes about how everyone’s first draft sucks, and that it’s okay. Those graduate students weren’t bastions of brilliance – they were writers who, like me, sometimes stared at the blinking curser on the screen feeling lost, sometimes both loved and hated writing at the same time, and they ultimately pushed through the tough stuff, using one another as a test-audience to help them think, compose, and communicate.

 It is empowering to see, rather that just be told, that writing is a messy, time-consuming process for everyone – even seasoned, accomplished writers. I hope that Tom understood what a gift he was giving me in seeing me as a valuable reader who could help him work through his “shitty first draft.” As a writing teacher and a writing center administrator, I am now in a position to mentor many developing writers. I try to pass the message on to them in deed as well as in word – I write when my students write, and I share my writing challenges with them so that they understand that even people who do this for a living have to work at it, and that’s okay.

 I’m excited to talk to you about mentoring writers during the Symposium, so let’s start the conversation here in the blog. I am interested in how you empower your students to see themselves as readers and writers whose thoughts matter. How do you show them that writing is a messy process, and how do you help them make peace with it? What resources do you use? How do you mentor?

I love it when the writing consultants get excited. Peer writing consultants, our close links to students we serve, often have a better sense of what their peers need from the writing center than we do. The most successful writing centers have consultants who are engaged with and invested in the writing center’s mission, actively participating in the running of the writing center.  To many consultants, working in the writing center is more than just a job. They feel that they’re part of a community. The key to building this kind of creative, collaborative environment is to create an space that encourages a sense of investment and inclusion in the writing centers community.

Consultants at the UM DeSoto Writing Center getting excited at a consultant development meeting.

Here are four things you can do to encourage community building in the writing center:

(1)    Regular consultant development meetings are great both for the sake of professionalization and to build community. At our meetings, we talk about the scholarship that informs their work, what they’ve observed in the writing center, and how their tutoring sessions connect to what they’ve read. We try to feed the consultants at the meetings – if you don’t have the money in your budget for food, you can make it a potluck occasion or see if any of your faculty supporters would be willing to taking a turn feeding the consultants.

Keena laughs beside the quote wall, the students’ space where they share inspirational, encouraging thoughts and pictures at the UM DeSoto Writing Center.

(2)    Give consultants space to express themselves within the center. If you don’t have a physical space for the writing center, you could give them a bulletin board or something to decorate. The above picture shows what our consultants did with the bulletin board in the UM DeSoto Writing Center. They can also express themselves in other ways – as writers in a blog, as contributors to the Facebook presence, or marketers and webmasters. When the space feels like theirs, they become more invested in the work.[youtube]http://youtu.be/-xUGdopS_GA[/youtube] Consultants at the UM Tupelo Writing Center worked together to create this marketing video.

(3)    Show them how others are speaking as part of the larger writing center community. During a consultant development meeting, Keena, one of our consultants, led a discussion of an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Praxis, a writing center journal; when she noticed that a peer tutor, like her, wrote the article, inspiration struck, and she swept the rest of the writing center staff up with her enthusiasm. Keena proposed hosting a tutoring conference to bring all of our consultants across three campuses together. Working closely with the UM DeSoto writing tutors and folding some of the other regional tutors into the planning, we created the first annual University of Mississippi TutorCon Peer Tutoring conference in Spring of 2012. It was a roaring success, and the tutors left feeling connected, inspired, and jazzed about planning next year’s conference.

Emily, a peer consultant, created this comic for the TutorCon 2012 program.

(4)   If they have an idea, let them take the lead. After a discussion of our social media presence, consultant Emily took the lead as our official UM DeSoto Writing Center Facebook Ambassador. Keena and Emily, both creative writers, worked together to organize a poetry workshop called Love Notions in honor of Valentines Day. They created and distributed marketing materials for the workshop, planned activities, and hosted the event in the writing center. Generally, the consultants have a great sense of what the writing community on campus needs. Listen to them and let them take the lead implementing their ideas.

These are a few of the ways we encourage tutor involvement as a way to nurture the writing center and the writing community. What do you do?