Bad writers
When I was younger, I was convinced that unless I was immediately good at something (and I dont mean Good as in “with practice,” i mean, immediately fantastic. Like a prodigy. Like, I dont know — Beethoven or someone) it wasn’t worth doing. As you might imagine, this really put a damper on a) the joy I got out of doing… much of anything and b) how much time I was willing to invest in things. I played the piano, but I wasn’t Beethoven, so why practice? I liked writing, but nothing I wrote came out immediately perfect, so obviously I wasn’t very good.
For a long, long time, I wrote very slowly. I obsessed about every single word. I was determined to write a perfect first draft, to not have to revise it at ALL. I thought that’s what Good Writers did. They sat down and, in the span of a few hours, they produced perfection. I thought the authors of my favorite books (The Westing Game, Princess Bride, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were all personal faves when I was younger) just… wrote them perfectly the first time around.
Like, I thought that they were publishing their first drafts.
I dont know where I got this idea. It’s possible I watched Amadeus (it’s a movie if you aren’t familiar) and the message I took from it was if you aren’t a tortured genius, you aren’t shit. What I do know is that being a perfectionist ruined me for a long time. The idea that if you aren’t perfect at something from the jump it isn’t worth doing? That’s a good way to keep yourself from doing anything at all.
It took me a long, long, long time to realize this is not true. That in order to write a book, you have to let yourself be a bad writer. You have to let yourself write things that you know are not great sometimes, just to keep yourself moving forward. You have to write knowing that a lot of what you’re doing might (probably will) change. You have to be okay with revising and revising and revising some more. I could be wrong (and please correct me if i am) but I dont know of anyone who writes perfect first drafts. Even after multiple rounds of revision, perfection is always out of reach.
We writers have to get used to “good enough” and then let our stories go.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, especially for a recovering perfectionist like myself, but I’m come to see it as freeing (or, at least, I try to see it as freeing. I don’t always succeed, trust me). If my first draft will change, then my sentence-level writing doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to BE.
The most important part of writing that first draft is just getting to the end.