One of the traps we fall into as writers is trying to be perfect first up.
But that isn’t healthy.
The anxiety of not getting it right cripples us, so we sit there, blocked, afraid to proceed.
Another problem here is that when we feel we do get it right, that confidence is never lasting. Look at that piece of writing the next day, and we’re not so sure.
So we live in this tumultuous state that compounds our insecurity. It becomes cyclic. The more certain we are that we need to get it right, the less we’ll write. The less we write, the more certain that we need to get it right when we do write. Then, inevitably, we don’t write at all.
The truth is there are no bad words.
That’s not to say everything we write is perfect. It never can be. Art is subjective. One reader’s perfection is another reader’s dubiousness.
And, at an early stage, our writing will be problematic. Read over your work, and you’ll see times you waffle, that you overwrite, that you underwrite, that you’re unclear, etc.
The thing is, though, once we identify those areas, we can work on them. We can’t do that with an empty page.
And the truth is sometimes we need to get the piffle down because we’re struggling to articulate what’s in our heads. Once we’ve conceptualized it on the page, we can dilute it in our prose.
But we need to cultivate that attitude. It doesn’t mean we’re going to be lazy. As we write, rewrite, and improve, we’ll find we’re evolving. Our first drafts of today will be the equivalent of our fifth drafts from two years ago.
We just need to acknowledge, and embrace, that redrafting will be necessary.
Some dread that, too – that their spill onto the page will ultimately be unshapeable. The truth is that, sometimes, we might run into that problem.
More often than not, though, there’ll be answers. If we can’t find them ourselves, that might be the time to get feedback from friends, grab a manuscript assessment, or consult an editor. There are always solutions.
As far as writing goes, producing words builds our writing muscle. Each time we do it – whatever we write – we grow stronger and stronger at the act of writing.
And the stronger we grow, the less we’ll allow that insecurity to stop us.