While Rae uses her characters to guide her narrative’s development. Lamott focuses on writing. Many designers will identify with Lamott’s admission to the difficulties they face starting a narrative. She makes clear that your first draft can be a “shitty first draft” and that no one will see it so write whatever feels good at the moment. “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, ‘Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?’ you let her. No one is going to see it” (Lamott, 1994, 21-22).
Rae and Lamott admit to bad writing days but say “just get started” and trust that the process gets more comfortable. In writing your narrative, even a half-page narrative is a beginning. When reviewed with friends or work cohorts for flow and continuity it grows in detail to a page or two. Lamott advises us to, “Start by getting something — anything — down on paper” (1994, 25-26).
Although referring to poetry, Kooser speaks to the critical importance of carefully selecting each word in a written narrative, knowing the person for whom you are writing, and that the end users need to be able to read the landscape narrative. “If a poem [read landscape narrative] doesn’t make sense to anybody but its author, nobody but the author will care a wit about it” (Kooser, 2005, xi). He goes on to admit to a degree of freedom in the writing process, with a caveat. “That doesn’t mean that your poems can’t be cryptic, or elusive, or ambiguous…as long as you keep in mind that there is someone at the other end of the communication” (2005, xi). Having approached the narrative-storyboard-design sequence with an understanding of the landscape narrative’s likely readers it is almost impossible to not “keep in mind that there is somebody on the other end of the communication” (2005, xi) and that they need to be able to comprehend what they are being asked to read. If your landscape’s end-users cannot read a landscape narrative they will probably feel anxious and confused, if not lost and upset.