Permission to write badly...

I'm sitting here being a chicken right now. I've been staring at my outline and sipping coffee for the last half hour, a blank Word document open on my laptop in front of me, and the only thing I've written is the word, "Prologue," centered at the top of the page. Today is the day I start writing the novel, even though the outline isn't complete. That's okay. I'll finish it as I go along. But I need to start writing.

This is normal. The beginning is often the hardest part. There's something about wanting to get the first sentence just right that makes it hard to start writing. I want it to be good. Not the first sentence. The whole thing. Good. The best writing I can do right now.

Which means not starting writing is less about the perfect first sentence (paragraph, chapter, novel) and more about the fear of it being bad. Terrible. Awful. Shitty. A waste of words. A miserable fucking turd. 

I mean, I'm trying to be a writer here, ya know?

So, instead of typing a less than perfect (or even bad) first sentence, I opened up the blog to bang out an entry. That's not a good idea, but it works for the blog. My original intent for the blog was to chronicle the journey of an aspiring writer. "From procrastination to publication," it reads at the top of the blog just under the title, and has since day one. Well, this fear of writing badly is definitely a part of that process, one I'm sure every aspiring writer has encountered at some point.

The question is, how do we get past it?

I recall a piece of advice that said, "Give yourself permission to write badly."

I thought a quick Google search might reveal the source. Instead, it reveals I am not the first writer to discuss the issue, and I won't be the last. There are 90 million results for that phrase. 

The idea is self explanatory. Write badly if you need to, because you can always fix it in the next draft. It's better to get something down on the page than to leave the page blank, especially for newer writers, who are more prone to this paralysis than the more experienced.

There's another saying that goes hand in hand that says, "Writers are the worst judges of their own writing." This is true, particularly in the heat of writing. There are things I've written that I loved as I wrote them, only to have them fall flat with alpha readers, as well as to my own reading several months later, after I'd nearly forgotten what I'd written. 

I've also picked up a piece of writing that I tossed in a drawer as terrible, only to find months later that it was damn good. Alpha readers agreed. 

You might think you are writing badly, and actually be tapping out the best writing of your life. You won't know at the time, and even later, depending on how much of a dick your inner critic is, you might not have a clear view. So go ahead and write. 

That's what I'm going to do now.

See you tomorrow.