The trickiest part of writing for me has never been starting it. Or finishing it, even. That was a hurdle that I eventually cleared, though it took me some time to negotiate. The hardest part of writing isn’t even making it a daily discipline or doing something that you think people will like.
No, the toughest part of this thing I do is letting something suck.
I think that the easiest trap that creative people fall into is getting frustrated when the thing they’re working on isn’t as good as they wanted it to be. It’s a pitfall in critical thinking that is hard to avoid. As your own worst critic, you want what you write or produce to be better than all the other drivel you see in the world, and you kill yourself over it.
It’s the opposite of having rose-colored glasses towards your own stuff, really. I know that there are plenty of people out there that struggle with being able to view their work through a filter of constructive criticism, and thus never grow out of whatever small snakeskins they’ve trapped themselves in. No, for me, I’m painfully aware of how awesome I want something to be, and how not awesome it actually is when I start working on it, which makes me a miserable boar of a person as I try to continue with it.
Working on Seven Sons is one of the trickiest things I’ve had to do, because writing a novel works completely against this part of my brain. It’s easy to let a script be terrible because you’ll be done with it in just a few days and can always go back. With something that’s over 100,000 words long, the whole thing just becomes messier and messier the farther you go into it. I’ve got dangling plot threads, terrible descriptions, horrible characterizations, storylines that aren’t fully worked out and chapters that keep ballooning larger than I ever intended them to be. It’s like pink blog Tetsuo at the end of Akira, and it is gross looking and full of WTF-sauce of the highest degree.
I had to train myself in the first couple of months to stop tweaking my old writing every time I sat down, and just let it be terrible so I could move forward. This became much easier after I spent 2-3 weeks working on a 10,000 word section that I realized I was ultimately going to have to scrap. After that, I didn’t have a problem with ignoring the sucky writing and moving on so I could make it better in the future during the next draft. Really, getting it done and out on paper is the hard part, and giving it the proper voice is the easy stuff. Already, through this big sloppy story I’m penning, I can see the story I want to tell peeking through. I just have to find it and work it out later.
All of this reminds me of a quote I love, but didn’t know who it was attributed to until very recently. It comes from a guy named Marc Raibert, who works in robotics. The writing he is actually talking about is probably coding of some kind, but he is smarter than me and also builds robots, so I think it’s cool regardless:
“My formula for good writing is simple: once you decide that you want to produce good writing and that you can produce good writing, then all that remains is to write bad stuff, and to revise the bad stuff until it is good.”
And really, that’s the secret sauce. Don’t quit on something just because it isn’t as good as you hoped it would be. Finish it and make it good later. Tune out the part of your mind that is screaming your inadequacies, get it done, and then look at it constructively when you can do something about it.
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