“People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting 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 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 fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts… For me and most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. If fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”
Anne Lamott
Beyond the Quote (43/365)
For all of you who are intimidated by the dreaded blank page and have insecurities and self-doubts about writing (or creating in general), let me reassure you: we ALL start out with really, really shitty first drafts. Not even the best writers in the world (the ones who you envision typing out those perfect, fully formed passages as fast as a court reporters can type) write their final copy on their first try. It just doesn’t happen. So, drop the expectation that you’ll be able to do that yourself (sorry not sorry)!
Writing is the act of clarifying and organizing thoughts and the idea of just whipping out final copies of perfectly organized sentences the first time around is simply ludicrous. You should never hold yourself to that standard nor should you ever let that perfectionist idea stop you from writing (or creating) in general. The process of writing is, even for the best in the world, a lot less glamorous and a lot more tedious than you might have imagined.
The process of writing starts out very messy and scatter-brained—as it should (it’s the act of organizing scattered thoughts, after all). Start by simply writing anything and everything that comes to mind (in regard to the topic at hand), in no particular order, following your train of thought in whichever direction it pulls you, and until you fill your blank page with your thoughts in full. It’s critically important at this stage to do everything you can to support the train of thought so that it keeps chuggin’ along and proactively prevent anything that might slow it down or stop it.
You need to discipline yourself to avoid distractions, restrain yourself from editing as you go, and get in the habit of skipping or adding blank spaces when you get stuck or hit a gap in thinking—losing the train of thought takes away all of the momentum in writing which can be incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. Then, once you have all of your scattered and unfiltered thoughts out of your head and onto the paper, it’s time to move onto phase two.
Phase two is all about taking that really, really shitty draft and now editing and adding. Understand that a lot of what you write the first time will get cut (maybe 80%) and most of the words you wrote the first time will get rearranged and changed just as much, too. This should be a comforting idea and should alleviate some of the anxiety associated with getting started. If most of what you write is going to just get deleted and changed anyway, why judge yourself so harshly about writing perfect sentences the first time around? Just keep it low pressure and super simple—focus on writing just a few words that relatively pertain to the idea, in a row. And do that over and over again until you have a first draft completed.
As you re-read your first draft you’ll undoubtedly end up rearranging ideas, changing words, filling in blanks, and adding in new ideas, which will leave you with a completely different, more refined piece of work. THIS is the phase when you edit and change—not after each sentence you write, and certainly not as you’re writing your sentences. Trying to kill two birds with one stone (by editing as you write), in this case, leaves you just missing both birds and wasting a bunch of time. Write a bunch of crap THEN edit to make that crap less crappy.
And so the process continues. You refine the crappy drafts to continuously make them less and less crappy and repeat until you end up with something that might at least slightly resemble a well organized, thoughtful essay. At which point, you should proceed to phase three and share your refined work with other pairs of eyes who can edit or at least provide feedback for improvement as well. It’s very often the case that we miss things that we thought we would see and so getting other people to take a look at our work is almost always a good idea. And once you get your relatively completed essay to the point where you can read through it and you don’t stumble on the flow of ideas or word choice, then it’s time to publish and share.
The amount of editing should obviously be proportionate to the importance / prestige of the paper, but don’t let the idea of perfection EVER keep you from putting your work out there—that’s why I said, “relatively” completed essay, because if you wanted to, you could very well never be done with your writing. And never publishing and never sharing your work is just about as bad as never producing it in the first place. Produce more, publish more, judge yourself less, and trust the process—the words you are looking for will come.
Read Next: 25 Quotes On The Power of Focus and How Important Focus Is For Success
Don't Let the Motivation Stop There...!
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