Traps We Lay for Ourselves

Inspiration strikes! Your muse has finally appeared and blessed you with a story, fully formed! It’s so vivid in your mind. It’s engaging, impactful, expressive, and beautiful. All you need to do now is put pen to paper and move it from nine o’clock to three o’clock.

You look at the blank document and suddenly anxiety floods you. Where to begin? How to begin? You write out a few sentences hoping to echo the grandiosity of what you have in mind. They suck. Obviously. These pathetic sentences are unbecoming of the story you have in mind. You crumple the page and toss it aside.

Clearly, you think, this is a story so deep that it requires intricate planning. You grab a second page and now your ideas flow out. A governmental system here, a character dynamic there, even a summary of the ending chapter. Now you have traction! This must be the way!

Weeks later, you have a binder of disjointed notes and not one page of story. The project has expanded exponentially and your expectations for yourself have risen accordingly. The story is essentially flawless, and it’s yours. Why the hell can’t you write it then!?

Cliche, trite, messy, plain, boring, inconsistent, unreadable. That’s what those few paragraphs you’ve managed to get down have been. The shocking disparity between how the story goes in your mind and this childish attempt at storytelling is causing massive cognitive dissonance. Now when you look at the page with every intention to give it another try, you know whatever you end up with is going to be crap. Screw it. You decide to keep worldbuilding and hope that one day your plan will be so perfect the story will come naturally. Maybe.

This has been a dramatization of why I stopped writing for almost a decade and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has experienced this trap. This is called perfectionism which has affected me in other ways as well. I’m still very miffed that this tendency of mine kept me from engaging in one of my favorite activities for so long. Fortunately I’ve finally accepted that the reason my writing hasn’t been up to my own standards was that I haven’t been honing my craft. That was it. Simple.

I’m now no longer embarrassed by what I write, just a little embarrassed that I stopped myself from engaging in the art for what in hindsight seem like very silly reasons. I still write many things that I’m not satisfied with and probably always will. Instead of regarding this as somehow a personal failure, I can now ask myself why I’m not satisfied with it. The answers to my own questions here have informed the direction I take my writing stylistically and conceptually. I discovered that it was not actually a problem that my prose looks vastly different than that of many of my favorite authors. I’m not them and I’m not doing the same thing that they are doing even though we’re all technically writing. I used to regard writing as somehow needing to conform to the proper academic style such as the neoclassical paradigm of the plastic arts in eighteenth century France, but in reality there isn’t one aside from basic standards of formatting and readability (which are not hard rules themselves if you know them well enough to subvert them).

The most powerful thing however is that I’m now writing only because I want to do it, and practicing writing only because I want a better story to read from myself. The only way to be a better writer is to write, and the only way I can write is if I want to do it. When you really care about what you’re writing you can see its potential through the mess of your initial attempts and you have the opportunity to bring it closer to your vision, or in my case, go in a completely different direction from the original idea. It really is what you make of it.

Whether it’s a few hundred words or a few thousand, any amount of writing of any kind is better than no writing of any kind. The epic can wait. Until then you can write episodes, short stories, essays on topics you’re interested in, and whatever else your fleeting desires pop into your mind. Even writing comments on Beehaw is something. If you want to write, write!