My mom got me the best holiday gift possible: a Cameo video from Mark Sheppard, the genius actor behind Supernatural’s Crowley. It’s easy to say that this gift did not just make my day or my week; it made my year. (For those who don’t know, I am a big Supernatural fan, especially Crowley.) Yet it’s not just the fact that it was Mark Sheppard who appeared in the video that made it so special. It was the message that he left for me that really lifted me out of the doldrums.
My mom told Mark Sheppard that I was having writer’s block. And it’s true. I’ve been having the worst writer’s block of my life recently. I’m especially having a hard time writing for my ghostwriting project. But Mark Sheppard reminded me of a basic truth of writing: writers just have to write, even if it turns out to be rubbish.
It’s advice that we, as writers, hear often. Just sit down and write. It doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish, so long as you get some writing done. However, that’s easier said than done.
Oftentimes, we say it’s because we don’t have time. Most of us have jobs outside of our writing, you know. We also have our families and social obligations, not to mention when we get sick (I just recently got over Covid myself). Yet even when we do have the time, we still can’t seem to find the inspiration. There’s too much noise, too many social media posts to get caught up on, too many TV shows and movies and books to dive into, too many distractions…
The truth, though, actually goes much deeper than that.
We are afraid of the rubbish.
Many of us writers are perfectionists. You could say that all artists are. We have a paralyzing fear of our writing not turning out perfectly the first time that we get it down onto paper, and so we just don’t write anything at all. Alternatively, we do write something, and then we rewrite that little something again and again and again, rather than marching forth with the rest of the piece.
There’s something that we need to realize, though: there’s no such thing as a perfect first draft. In fact, all first drafts are probably rubbish. That’s why we get feedback, revise, and edit, after we have finished the first draft.
If we want to make it as writers, if we truly want to push past our writer’s blocks, we need to embrace our rubbish, not run away from it. We need to get past the fear of imperfection and just write. Even if it’s just a little bit of rubbish every day, we need to write something.
After all, one word soon becomes two words. Two words become a sentence. A sentence becomes a paragraph, a paragraph becomes a page, a page becomes a chapter, and a chapter becomes a book. It just takes persistence. The polishing of the turd, so to speak, can wait until later.
Yes, we have our obligations that we must tend to before our writing. That is the way of life. However, we should not let a fear of turning out rubbish keep us from writing at all. It is our passion, and we cannot allow anything to stand in the way of us pursuing that passion, let alone ourselves.
Now, in the words of Crowley, let’s go raise some Hell.
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I think I might do that 😛