“Darn it, it’s my writing day, and I didn’t sleep well last night. Now I’ll be tired, and my thinking won’t be sharp. Maybe I should just forget about writing today. I don’t want to take the chance the writing won’t be any good. I should put it off until another day when I’m feeling rested and fresh.”
That’s the way I used to think about writing. I wanted to be at my best when I did it, so the writing would be as good as possible. It sounds so reasonable. After all, no one wants to write badly.
The problem is that once you decide you need to have a good night’s sleep so you can write well, you find yourself thinking you also need to be focused. So, you can’t really write when you have a lot going on and you’re likely to be distracted.
The next thing you know, you’ve got a whole list of reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t write on a particular day. Which, of course, leads to writing not happening at all.
The brilliant Lawrence Block, author of Write for Your Life, offers this advice to break the I-can’t-write-today pattern: “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or ten 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.”
Take the pressure off yourself to write well every time you sit down at the keyboard. Writing badly has a place in every writer’s life. Five pages of writing badly captures your initial thoughts on a topic for future expansion. Five pages of writing badly can later be edited. Five pages of writing badly is better than zero pages of writing at all.
