Perfect First Draft Syndrome

I’ve been having some trouble lately. A couple of months ago I developed a painful condition in one shoulder that led me to suspend typing for an extended period. I tried speech-to-text but I was unimpressed with the results. I tried writing longhand, but although I have found it a useful tool for unlocking creativity, it has its own limits. In the end, I just stopped writing until I could figure out what was wrong with my shoulder.

Well, now my shoulder is much better (thank you), but the writing hasn’t really gotten back on track. I’ve worked on some older stuff that only needed editing, and I did draft one flash piece, but I have two novels in progress on my hard drive, and they are currently “in progress” in name only.

The truth is they were struggling before I got hurt (for various reasons not relevant here), but the reason I can’t seem to return to them is a more fundamental one than any I was wrestling with before: It seems I have what I like to call Perfect First Draft Syndrome.

Perfect First Draft Syndrome is akin to writer’s block, but it’s less a problem with figuring out what to write than it is with simply getting underway on a project.

Anyone who has followed me for a while knows that I subscribe to the “shitty first draft” method spelled out in Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. In essence, your first draft is your spitball draft, the throw-the-spaghetti-at-the-wall-to-see-if-it-sticks draft. This is where anything goes, just empty out your subconscious and see what lands of the page. It can be messy, it can be misspelled, it can be utterly incoherent—doesn’t matter. What matters is that somewhere down in that muddy puddle of words lie a few sentences that you can use, that tell a story. You pan for those and throw the rest away.

And you never, ever, show that draft to anyone. The knowledge that no one will ever see it will free you to set down the words you need.

Yeah, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But every writer has an editor in his head, and that editor can’t wait to weigh in even when you want him to shut up. When that editor gains the upper hand before you start to write the story, you get Perfect First Draft Syndrome. “What if it’s no good?” the editor asks. “It’s got to be great right out of the gate!” he insists.

Of course, none of this is true, but when the editor escapes from his assigned spot in your brain, he acts like an idiot. Think of him like the “suits” at movie studios who tell directors how to make a film even though they’ve never set foot on a set.

And yet, like the suits, the editor wields great power. He can stall a project just by standing there. He doesn’t even have to chain himself to a bulldozer. He simply looks you in the eye and asks: “Is this the best you can do?” even though you haven’t done it yet.

Still, he isn’t invincible. If he were, nothing would ever get written. The way past him is to write something, anything, so long as it is an unplanned, spontaneous piece, so the editor has no chance to jump in front of the train. It can be a flash story, for example, or even a blog post. Enough that you learn again how not to listen to the editor and just do the job of writing. The editor can have his shot later.

Sometimes this works immediately. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it helps to remember that nothing is ever perfect anyway. It doesn’t have to be. It just has to satisfy an editor.

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“Tis Better to have Written and Been Rejected…”

…than never to have written at all. No surprise there.

But I noticed an odd thing about my writing the other day–or rather, the writing I was not doing. I’d been going through a bout of writer’s block (yes, it is real; I will go to the mat on this), but of late I could feel the ice beginning to thaw. My problem had been not so much that I couldn’t write about anything, but rather that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to write about. Nothing I could come up with held any interest for me, and what doesn’t interest you won’t interest your reader.

And then something came to me. It concerned a character I’ve written extensively about, so I knew both that I could do it and that I would find it interesting. And yet, I couldn’t get started. Every time I tried a little voice in my head said, “Don’t write that. It won’t be any good.”

I’ve written before about the two halves of a writer’s brain: Let’s call them the Creator and the Editor. The Creator is that spirit that lets you sit down and write something new. The Editor is the one who comes in afterward and cleans up the messy bits, trims the fat, etc. Ideally, these two operate independently, but very often the Editor will try to horn in on the creative process, which only slows it down.

The trick with writing is to tell the Editor to sit at his desk and play games on his phone until the Creator is finished with the first draft, no matter how long or messy that process is. Unless you’re Shakespeare or Asimov, your first draft is supposed to be garbage. (If you don’t believe me, look here.) But with most of us, it’s not that easy. After all, while admitting to your mistakes is admirable, it’s generally considered better not to make them in the first place. Hence your Editor hounding you about revisions even as you’re getting the words down.

I didn’t know it, but my Editor had taken matters a step further. And I didn’t see it until a friend was telling me about a documentary he was watching about the Beatles. He said it was amazing that they started with a fragment of music, added to it until it was a whole song, then honed the song until it became the genius we know today. I said, “The thing about great art is that people don’t see it until it’s great.”

After all, art is like an iceberg. The reader or the listener or the viewer only sees what’s above the surface, but most of the work that went into it lies below. And that theme kind of rolled around in my head until I sat down to write that evening and suddenly I realized that the Editor wasn’t content any more merely with the tinkering that would remain below the water line–he wanted to tell me what to write in the first place.

The second this dawned on me, it was like the proverbial weight off my shoulders. I told the Editor to sit down and mind his own business until I was done. He hasn’t, but he hasn’t tried to stop me any more, either. And now I’m deep into a story that I know I will finish and if it isn’t good enough, well, I know who to call.

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Before I go, I need to mention that I have a new story, “Collateral Damage” out in the inaugural issue of Sally Port Magazine. The tag line is, “The laurel wreath of victory is woven with the bones of its victims.” When wizards fight for the fate of kingdoms, do they remember who it is they’re fighting for?

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