Doing It Anyway

Thank all that’s holy for Anne Lamott.  When she wrote, “All first drafts are shitty*,” she gave a generation of writers permission to unabashedly write crap the first time out and be okay with it.   That was huge for me when I read it a few years back.  And it was especially huge today.

Today I did my very best to ignore negative portents of futility, obstacles, no energy and too much of a good thing. I refused to allow myself to be dragged down by discouragement and pain.  And so I wrote crap.  Inserting some new words into what I thought were some pretty decent words.   Gilding the lily, from my perspective.

But what really mattered was that I did it.  I wrote.   When I was scared.  When I was discouraged.  When I felt like chucking the whole damned thing. When I really didn’t feel like it.  When there was no huge inspiration, no feeling of excitement and bliss that I get sometimes when I’m really one with the creative spark.

Normally, I would have run yipping to the couch with my tail between my legs to seek succor in Other People’s Stories.  But, I didn’t do that.  Instead, I wrote.  I wrote anyway.

And at the end of a tough day, when I had to refuse to discuss a job further that sounded so fun because the money was only half of what I needed to live on.  When I called my mother to enjoy our verbal sparring, and she was vague and retelling the same things she’d told me yesterday and slurring and searching hard for words.  When I was discouraged that both my books fell short of the word count requirement of a publisher accepting submissions.  When a third review of a short story was panned by most reviewers. Today, I had one laurel to rest on.

I wrote using my unsticking formula, and it worked.  Some of what I wrote was decent.  And some of it was downright shitty.

Thank you, Anne Lamott, for making shitty a perfectly fine thing to draft.

So, on a no-good, lousy, rotten, terrible day, shitty writing was a major triumph.   Because I felt better afterward.  Because I did it anyway.

I can go back to what I wrote tomorrow, and it will still be shitty, but I can work with that.

 

* in her book, Bird by Bird.