Writers: Back to Basics
You have to ask yourself why you started writing in the first place. Maybe you know the exact date and precise event that prompted you to spurt out a story. Maybe you have no idea how to pinpoint it, you just remember writing all your life. Hopefully, the answer to why you started writing is this: I wanted to.
Then, you have to ask yourself why you continued to write. Hopefully, that is a lot easier to answer and you can rattle off a whole list of things along the lines of you enjoying writing. You started and you liked it and so you kept doing it.
Now, you have no idea where to start and no idea where to go when you do. We all know it as “writer’s block.” In reality, we also know that it is a matter of perfectionism. As we grow older, everything becomes more serious and we have to be good at something in order to do it. What we forget is that “good” is a highly subjective term and by no means is expected from a first draft. We forget about the stories of our childhood and how they were riddled with spelling errors and plot holes. But if we never wrote those stories that we laugh at now, we would never be the writers we are today.
Our passion for writing sprung from the joy of writing when we first started doing it. It was exciting to make things up and tell a story. We didn’t care about spelling or punctuation or if the main character kept the same name throughout the story. What mattered was putting the ideas on the paper. As children, we were really good at this first step of writing. As we got older, we complicated the first step by telling ourselves that putting the ideas on the paper had to be done “right” or not at all. Blame timed essays or other exams, the pressure of having to get things right the first try is driven into us more and more as our lives proceed through education and into our careers.
Honestly, honestly, and I cannot stress this enough, the best thing to do as a writer is write! That’s right: write!
Reading and writing are a writer’s water and oxygen. The same way you don’t have to know if you’re going to like a book in order to start reading it, you don’t have to know if your idea is good in order to start writing it. Poets are the best example of this because they live by the rule that a poem is never really finished, they live off of revising endlessly. Other kinds of writers forget that that’s an option, the whole revising thing. Nothing we write is set in stone the minute we put it on the page. We are allowed to hate it and change it or rearrange it. But we can’t figure out what to do with it if there is nothing there to work with.
So write! Rome wasn’t built in a day. The world’s highest selling book has over 100 versions in the English language alone. That book is the Bible. It took F. Scott Fitzgerald two years to write The Great Gatsby, which wasn’t even popular in its time. It took Joseph Heller eight years to write Catch-22. And J.R.R. Tolkien spent twelve years on The Lord of the Rings series and another five years trying to get it published. Dr. Suess spent a year and a half writing The Cat in the Hat.
You have to start writing the story in order to know what the story is. So be a kid again, discover the feeling of putting words on a page again, and let your first draft run rampant with red squiggly underlines, major plot holes, and random anecdotes. Start there and then worry about the finer details. A first draft is basically the definition of imperfect, that’s why it exists. We get to be imperfect and work towards the “final” draft, which means there is endless room for drafts in between. You can’t make something shine if there’s nothing there to polish.
