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| Photo credit: photosteve101 on Flickr |
I’m not here to talk about all the different ways a writer
could fail, because quite frankly, we writers—hell, we as a people in
general—tend to be pretty hard on ourselves when it comes to chasing our dreams
and goals. Any hiccup, speed bump or letdown could be in one way or another
interpreted as a failure.
Failure is a natural part of life—it’s a testament of the
risks we’ve taken, they’re battle scars impossible to avoid throughout our
lives and in the end, they leave us all the wiser.
But there’s this one particular failure that many writers
are afraid of, one that has killed novels before they had a chance to live, one
that has thwarted dreams and left many-a-writer feeling unworthy of the title.
By and large, writers are often afraid of writing badly.
I see it all the time on Twitter—writers who want to write, who have this goal, this
dream of finishing their manuscript, who have put some words down and see
others speeding ahead to meet their daily writing goals…and yet they hesitate.
They look at the words they have so far and they pause. They say things like
“I’m stuck,” or “I just can’t write today,” or “Maybe I’ll write later.”
And I recognize it because I’ve been there—because at times,
I still find myself there. For me, the fear or writing badly is at its worst
just before I start a new novel—that lingering whisper that looks at the plot
I’ve thrown together or the first words I’ve scratched onto paper and sneers
while it says the words: your writing sucks. They’re the doubts that crawl in
and say, you can’t really write that—it’s
going to be terrible.
For others, the fear of writing badly kicks in part-way
through the story. It doesn’t matter when it kicks in though, because the
result is the same: a seeming inability to write.
Something you need to understand—something I occasionally
need to remind myself of—is this fear of failure is a lie. It’s a trick,
because by being so afraid to put down a word, you’re already failing. By not
writing anything at all, you lose by default.
Something you need to understand is it's infinitely
better to have 80,000 words of a mediocre story than nothing at all.
Something you need to understand is even if you have to
toss those 80,000 words and rewrite the whole thing entirely, even if the
manuscript ends up in the bottom of a drawer, even if the words are so awful
you’re embarrassed to show even your closest friends, you haven’t failed at
all.
You haven’t failed because you wrote something; you created something, something that no one
else could create the way you did. And maybe it’s ugly, and maybe it’s not the
way you imagined it, but none of that matters because with every word you
write, with every chapter you string together, with every novel you
finish—terrible or not—you learn something. Those 80,000 words didn’t write
themselves—you learn from the process just as much as you learn from reading
and studying the craft.
The fear of failure is a lie, because you cannot fail, not
really—you can only learn from your experience. And maybe you learn that you
went about it the wrong way, or that you really need to study how to write
dialogue, or that you’ve possibly written the most cliché-ridden antagonist in
the history of terrible antagonists, but you learned something. And you’ll take
whatever you’ve learned with you as you write the next book, the next short
story or poem or whatever it is you write.
When you’re afraid of writing badly, don’t be. Put the words
down and let them be God-awful and know that it doesn’t matter. These words are
yours and one way or another, you’ll
learn from them.
So go forth and write, friends. I’ll be cheering you along
the way.
Also, read this beautiful post, DON’T
BE AFRAID TO WRITE A BAD BOOK, from Tahereh Mafi, which basically covers
everything I didn’t, and then some.
