Wally Lamb, the bestselling author of She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, delivered the commencement address at Connecticut College in 2003. As both a novelist and a longtime writing teacher — including his groundbreaking work teaching creative writing to women inmates at York Correctional Institution — Lamb used the metaphor of the writing process to talk about life itself. He told the graduates that the first draft of anything is never the final version, and that the willingness to revise, to rethink, and to start over is what separates good writing from great writing — and a good life from a meaningful one. Just as a writer must be willing to cut a beloved scene that isn't working, a person must be willing to abandon plans and assumptions that no longer serve them.