One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. —Lawrence Block
In my last blog, I talked about the intimidation of the blank page, and about how just thinking about my own stories can sometimes be more productive than actually writing them (which can come later). But sometimes other things can create the block, such as the fear of putting “garbage” down on the page. Trying for perfection from the beginning can stop your creative juices from flowing.
We’ve all been there—you write something, reread it, and think, “This is awful.” It can be discouraging, and I hate it, but the reality is, more often than not what I initially put down on the page is not very good. It can be a dumb idea, or an awkwardly worded sentence, or a passage that has no vitality in it. That first attempt often has to be revised and reworked many, many times and then sometimes ends up being deleted anyway. On the rare occasions that a sentence or passage comes out “just right” the first time, I feel lucky.
So now I don’t worry about putting down garbage when I’m first trying to construct a sentence or a scene or whatever because I know that it’s just part of the process, that I’ll have a chance down the road to make it “pretty” during the revision process. And that frees me up a little.