It Might Be Horrible, But At Least It’s Done

[lilithsaintcrow]

Five AM this morning, I rolled over and blinked blearily. The itching was going on under my skin and sleep was an impossibility.

So I got up. I had breakfast. I went for a forty-minute run, did my shovelgloving, settled down and opened up the file for the second YA book. The words jolted free, each one of them immediately second-guessed.

That’s not good enough. Jesus, this book is going to be horrible. Please. What makes you think you can write?

Kept going. I had to keep going.

About ten minutes ago I squeezed out the last of just-over three and a half thousand words, bringing the zero draft of the book to 64K and change. It may suck like a huge sucking thing–my zero drafts always do–but it will no longer be a sucky unfinished novel.

I have to learn this each time. Three-quarters of the way through I begin to hate the book with the gigantic flaming hatred of a thousand suns. I slow down, I slog, I think this will never be done.

But then, something happens. I can only call it the Muse. She turns over, yawns prettily, and proceeds to daintily hork up a huge chunk of text. The end of the book unreels. And I sit here in THE CHAIR, blinking, wondering what the hell just hit me.

Of all the things I had to learn to let go of to do this job for a living, the need to have the work be “acceptable” in the first pass was probably the hardest. Zero drafts are messy and incomplete by their very nature. I know enough about my process now to know that setting the damn thing aside for a week or two now is my best bet. When I come back to it, it’ll look better. I’ll find things in it I don’t remember writing, pretty good things. I’ll be able to polish and shine it until I can stand to have someone else look at it.

You see, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be halfway good. You are not a good judge of your own work in the heat of creation. You’re too close to it, too vulnerable. Critique and self-edit is not what the heat of creation is for. It’s for creating, getting the raw stuff on the table. If you don’t go through this critical step, you’ll have nothing to edit and make better.

My brain’s just about worn smooth from the text dump, and I’m finding it difficult to come up with a halfway-decent Friday writing post. So I’ll just say this: don’t judge your work while you’re in the middle of writing it. Just pour it out and then worry about shaping it. Do not do yourself the great disservice of trying to hork up an Inner-Critic-approved book in the first few stages. Trying to make your Inner Critic happy is a losing bet anyway; trying to do it with a vulnerable, tender zero draft is madness. It’s one of the surest ways to hurt yourself.

So be gentle with yourself, huh? And I’ll try to be gentle with myself too. It’s something I have to remind myself each goddamn time. You’d think I’d learn, but I’ve only learned enough to stop resisting the urge to get the damn thing out of my head and onto the paper.

Maybe that is progress.

Posted from A Fire of Reason.