Amateur Writers Want Everything To Be Perfect The First Time Around

“As an amateur one always want to write ‘well’. “

That’s a comment I received on something I posted in the Writer’s Digest forums. I’ve been writing fiction since I was 13, and I’ve been writing professionally for almost seven years, so I really wouldn’t consider myself an “amateur” by any means.

That was, however, until I read that comment.

That comment really slugged me in the face. In fact, it almost knocked me out cold. Maybe I AM an amateur fiction writer, because it seems like most of the time the reason I don’t write is because I’m always worried that what I write will suck.

I think a lot of writers have a “perfectionist” inside them. You would think being a perfectionist is a good thing, but when it comes to fiction writing, perfectionism will hinder you a lot more than it will help you.

When you’re writing fiction, you need to be able to get everything down on paper before you start judging how good or bad it is. But that’s often very hard to do. Which is why writers procrastinate, not because they don’t want to be writing, but because they don’t want to be writing badly.

If we’re ever going to reach our writing dreams thou, we need to be able to rise above the need for perfection and allow ourselves to write badly. One of my favorite writing books, Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott, has an entire first chapter dedicated to what she calls the “shitty first draft.”

Here’s a passage from that chapter:

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”
–Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird