Fear of failure is something that keeps many people from writing. They dream of being published but hold back because they're afraid their writing isn't good enough. They worry other people will read it and think it sucks.
Sometimes this fear is enough to stop a writer from sending her manuscript out to agents and publishers. Sometimes it's enough to stop her from writing anything at all.
In my experience, there is only one surefire way to overcome this fear -- give yourself the freedom to fail.
Give yourself permission to suck. In fact, don't just give yourself permission. Expect your first draft to suck. That's why it’s called the first draft -- because it's the first in a planned series of drafts, each hopefully better than the last. Even bestselling authors don't turn out perfect prose on their first try.
One screenwriter I know refers to her first draft as the "vomit draft", nicknamed as such because the process involves spewing forth the words as quickly as possible without letting the messiness of it all slow you down.
Give yourself the freedom to write crappy material. Don't worry about how it sounds. Don't worry about grammar or spelling errors. Don't worry about anything other than the fact that if you don't try, you'll never know. If you don't write, you'll never publish that novel. You'll never sell that screenplay. You'll grow old thinking and wishing about what you could have done.
Turn off your internal editor and just get the words on paper.
This is more difficult than it sounds. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, your internal editor just won't shut up. When that happens, take a five-minute break and have a friendly little chat with it. Tell it you value its opinion, you're grateful for its help, and very soon it will have its time in the spotlight, but at the moment your goal is to give it some words to play with later. The operative word here is "later". Not now, when your only objective is to get through the first draft.
So don't just give yourself permission to write badly. Plan it. Tell yourself, "This draft is going to stink, and that's perfectly fine with me." When your first draft is finished, it probably won't stink nearly as much as you expected it to, but if it really does stink, that's okay. It's a learning experience. Every chapter, scene, and draft is one more step along the path.
If you give yourself the freedom to fail, every page you write will bring you closer to success.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very true. When I started blogging, I would try to write a good first draft, editing as I went. But most of the sections wouldn’t fit into the final post, so I’d throw them out anyway. I don’t know what I’m going to write until *after* the first draft. That’s the prototype, when I see what ideas work for the final point I’m working on. So my process has become: write a draft, leave it for a while, then rewrite from scratch based the structure and ideas from the first draft. Once I got that process, writing became much smoother. Thanks for posting about it!
I find I can never completely turn off my internal editor, so instead I have to ingore it and resist the urge to edit as I write the first draft. Whenever I’m writing a non-fiction piece, I approach the first draft as a stream-of-consciousness exercise — write everything that comes to mind, keep writing non-stop for a set period of time, and then sort it out when you’re done. My process is similar to yours and I don’t always know what I’m going to write until after it’s written. I occasionally try mind-mapping first just to get the initial ideas and key points on paper.
When I’m writing fiction, I have a different process and my first draft comes out much more organized. It still requires plenty of editing, but it’s much easier since I already know where each scene and chapter is headed.