Dr. Emily said last night that I should have a blog to write about writing in. She's been trying to talk me into a Live Journal ever since she got one, but we blog for very different reasons. She's all into the community thing, friending other people, and the RSS feed where she can read us all at once. Anti-social me, I'm interested in the blog as a showcase, or at least a practice arena. I've been culling rough drafts from here and saving them to work on as essays. I'm looking at this as a goad to keep me writing about something, anything, if only as an exercise. Since she got me into blogging in the first place, I feel I owe her for that, so I'm trying to encourage her to write every day to jump-start her own writing career. Coupled with Natalie Goldberg's philosophy of writing in Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind (both of which I highly recommend), blogs are a great tool for a writer.
Of course you could write every day in your notebook or at your keyboard in your word processing program (shoutout for WordPerfect here), but there's something about writing in a more public forum that makes me, at least, work harder. And the fact that I've got readers (I know you're out there, even if you don't comment; I've been checking my stats) is an incentive to keep updating and keep writing. It's sort of like having a class with clear deadlines, except there's no teacher but experience.
Although I'm probably a little more careful than most people about what gets posted (and I actually have no way of knowing this), what comes out here is definitely a first draft, and largely unpolished, though my first drafts tend to be pretty clean and always have been. I do a lot of back office processing in my head long before I sit down to write anything, even something this spontaneous. Before I sit down to write I've been thinking about a topic, usually, so it's at least a little focused. Sometimes I'm really surprised by where something goes when I start writing. More often it just fizzles out.
I doubt whether this has anything to do with writing "spontaneously" at the keyboard, though writers are usually pretty particular about their tools. I made the transition from longhand to keyboard almost as soon as I learned to type, though that was onto an electric typewriter at first. The nice thing about typing is that, if you're a touch-typist and get really good at it, you can type almost as quickly as you can think, which is a far sight better than scratching it out with a pen, in some cases. And there's a huge difference between typing something out on a typewriter and entering it into a computer with a keyboard.
There's some debate about whether this makes writing "better" now than in the past (an impossible call to make, I think). It certainly makes it easier to revise. Whether this makes writers more reckless or sloppy, or lets them think less about their craft is impossible to say. It's harder to keep track of the number of drafts this way, at least for me. I rarely save the old copy before I start revising, unless I'm moving to an entirely different format, like culling a short story from a novel chapter, or moving from blog to formal essay. Instead, I'll sit down and read the piece from the beginning and revise as I go along. When I'm writing something out in the first draft I tend to go back and reread as I go along too, which makes it hard to separate first drafts from third or fourth. It's more accurate to say that parts of a finished piece are third or fourth draft and the last couple of paragraphs (which is what I always have trouble with) are second or third draft. But then there's all those rough drafts I've written in my subconscious before I even sit down at the keyboard, so who knows where that puts it. The one genre I still often write out in longhand is poetry. I like the opportunity to retune each line as I write out the drafts over and over. I don't usually do more than six longhand drafts, tops, of a poem. If it takes more than that, I figure I'm straining the metaphor past the breaking point.
I think this pretty much sums up my process, as far as writing about writing. Someone or other was recently complaining in print somewhere about the plethora of poems that are about writing poems, which also seems like the epitome of narcissism to me. The point of the complaint was that most of those writers don't have a life to write about because they've spent so much time in school learning how to write. While I'm interested in the craft of writing, and interested in discussions of it to a point, I think there's only two ways to learn it: read a lot and write a lot. Writing as an occupation or a craft is a hands-on activity that requires on the job training. It's interesting to talk about theories of craft and practice, but they're like theories of war: it's never as neat or tidy as the theory except in hindsight. In the trenches it's all about you and the white void. The only useful activity is to fill it. 
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