The Necessity of Mess

   I suffer from perfectionism. It can be a good thing, and sometimes looking closer at something can identify tiny problems that could be disastrous, but it many fields of life, perfectionism just makes things difficult. It stresses me out. It keeps me from finishing things. It even keeps me from starting them, because I'm afraid that I'll never be able to do or make something "good enough."
   (Note: this is not a post about proof-reading or editing. They exist for a reason.)
   Perfectionism in art and writing stifles creativity and imagination. It keeps you frozen with fear and indecision and nit-picking. Good news, though! For a large amount of writing and other kinds of art, you don't need to make something perfect. In fact, you don't even need to make it good. You just need to get started.

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” - Robert Cormier

   First drafts and beginnings and practice are supposed to be messy and unedited and, above all, private. Nothing stresses you out more than trying to perform to other people's standards when you're supposed to be doing nothing more than laying the groundwork. It's not supposed to make sense to other people, because other people aren't you and therefore don't have the whole picture.

“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” - Shannon Hale

   Practice and first drafts are the structure that supports your writing. You can't tell what something looks like when it's completely put together by studying its skeleton. At most, you get the basic shape. First drafts are even more basic, just capturing fleeting ideas and pinning them down on paper. It comes out messy and disjointed and often discouraging, because you can feel what it's supposed to be but it't just not measuring up. Sometimes you know why, sometimes you don't.

"Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it." - Anne Lamott

   If you don't know what you're doing, then you're doing it right. We can never grow if we don't keep going beyond what we know now. So write, write, write, and keep writing, and rewrite too, but don't let old works stifle new ones. If it's just writing practice, let it be messy. Only rewrite if you're practicing rewriting or if what you've written is already laid out, beginning to end. Rewriting in the middle muddles your mind and ties you in confused creative knots. Begin! Move forward! Don't stop! And then, when you've finished your first draft, brainstorm, dissect, chop up, move, add, and delete until you have a firm structure. Do it again, and again, until the shape of the story is as close as you can make it to what it should be, and then you can worry about word choice and sentence structure and that pesky little descriptive.

"Just do it." - Nike

   And if a full novel is too big, try a short story. After two exhausting first drafts and six months of laziness-induced writer's block, that's what I'm doing. I don't know much about writing. I'm a new writer. I will work on my first drafts, because you never learn it if you don't do it, but I will also write for the joy of writing and I will practice the act of completion on a smaller scale. My first drafts may never see the inside of a publishing house, but they taught me things, and so they are time well spent.