Here at The Pickup we take very seriously the necessity of the "shitty first draft," a concept Anne Lamott made popular in her fabulous book on writing Bird By Bird. Lamott insists that you can't get to a good draft without getting a few shitty ones down on the page (or Google Docs, in our case) first.
Here's Lamott:
People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated.
Lamott goes on.
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.
So in that spirit we thought we would share a bunch of the names—some shitty, some not so shitty—we came up with as we brought The Pickup into the world.
Heartlandish
Doppler
The Alley
The Pickup
Lowdowner
Gasland
Time and Temp
The Weaver
Gander
Phenom
The Orbit
Mixtape
Patter
The Oracle
The Listener
Influx
Check Out
Right Time
Heard
The Scanner
Four-Track
Spurred Talk
Prairie Beat
Culture Department
Excavator
The Whistler
Orbiter
The Orbit
The Riff
Plainspeak
Plainspoken
Alley Talk
Torrent
Phenom
Moxie
The Wildcatter
Coastal Bias
Flyover
Tulsa Heat
Hatchet
No Coast
Red Dirt Radar
The Rumble
Rumble Radar
The Record
Zigzag
Special thanks to Megan Shepherd for facilitating the naming workshop, and to Hannah Gray and Cassidy McCants for contributing.
