I used to stare at a blank Google docs sheet as I started writing for a feature article that I had been working on. I stared at it for so long, not realizing that 30 minutes had passed and I hadn't gotten past three sentences. I was so busy forming sentences in my damn head and discarding them as 'ugly' that I hadn't written much.
It was a painful process (although I do enjoy writing) every single time, but sooner I realized it was natural.
You have to write 100 words first before you get to write 300.
In Julian Shapiro's short essay, The Creativity Faucet, he explained that our minds work like a faucet. You have to clear the dirty water that was stagnated in the tubes before having access to the clean ones. Our minds only have one passageway, so we have no choice but to clear the dirty water first before we have the clean one. Similarly, in writing, our first ideas are not-so-good. They are our pre-conceived ones and not the best; hence, we must discard them. But discarding them doesn't mean that we just ignore them in our head. We get to free up our minds to connect and think of new ideas by writing them down.
Author of Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, calls it "Shitty First Drafts": "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy."
So whenever I get an idea for something to write, I write them down first, even just a sentence, so my mind can think up more and dig deeper. It doesn't matter if I knew that it was bad or I'd edit it out later; what matters is that I got it down, now my mind is free to connect more ideas, far away ideas.
Unfortunately, even with this in mind, writing still doesn't feel easy to me, but I still enjoy it a lot (that's why I am still here).
David Rakoff, author of Half Empty, perfectly captured the pain of shitty first drafts "Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever)."
In Still Writing, author Dani Shapiro wrote perfectly about the feeling that you have to start all over again regardless of how many you have written previously. The new one doesn't care; you have to start from the beginning all over again.
"When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don't want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn't just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we're writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won't succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt—spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown."
It feels good, surprisingly. Knowing that people who had been writing for so many years more than I do still find writing painful or feels harder every time. At first, it made me feel shit, but it was great not to feel so alone. And every time I write another article or another essay, I remember that it is always hard at the beginning, and whatever I wrote in the past doesn't matter. I have to climb all over again.
One of my favorite authors, Austin Kleon, also always tries to remember that first drafts are always terrible every time he is in the middle of working on a new book. He even created a motto out of it that not only applies to writing but in life as well: "It doesn't matter if it's good right now, it just needs to exist."
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