“You do not have to be good / You do not have to walk on your knees” — Mary Oliver
Writing has never been an act of perfection, yet we’ve collectively convinced ourselves that in order to call ourselves writers, we must be perfect. We are so afraid to fail that we sabotage ourselves at the start by letting ourselves believe that perfection is attainable. So, here’s why you deserve to be a writer: you are not perfect and you will fail miserably.
Writing is a process. It is a learning experience. It will make you laugh, cry, pound your fists against your desk, dance circles around your living room, scream into the night sky with frustration, and all of that is what makes writing worth it. It is what makes you a writer! You will mess up (yay!), you will spend hours staring at blank pages (even better!), you will have to rework every thread of your plot and rewrite every single chapter (can’t wait for this one to happen to me!). You have to become better. You cannot simply be better.
We often have a specific image of what it is to be a writer in our heads: sitting in a small French café with rain drizzling lazily outside, cigarette smoke hanging around your head, and a well-used notebook open in front of you next to your cappuccino as you write non-stop with an ink pen. If not this exactly, I’m sure a similarly aesthetic, Pinterest quality image comes to your mind of the people who get to call themselves writers. This alone is why many of us don’t think we are allowed to call ourselves writers. We don’t have the right kind of desk, we don’t drink coffee or tea every time we write, we don’t smoke, we write on a laptop rather than by hand, we don’t live in the sort of house a writer would live in. We believe that the image of the work is more important than the work itself. This is not true. You do not have to fit a certain kind of image or aesthetic in order to be a writer. It is very important that you do not try to do so. This is just another area we think we have to pursue perfection.
I spent a lot of time waiting until I was “ready” to begin writing my first novel. I couldn’t stomach the idea of putting hours, months, even years into a project that was doomed to fail because I was not good enough to write it. I didn’t know enough about plot structure, character development, outlining, creating conflict, etcetera, etcetera. The problem is that the only way to learn how to do those things is by writing a novel.
So, here is what you do; you stop trying to prove yourself and just start. You start exactly where you are, as exactly who you are. Write down the idea you’ve been carrying around for years in your mind. Write the characters you gravitate towards. Put words on the page even if there’s a chance you might need to erase them later. The important part is that you start, no matter how scared you are. I was scared to declare my creative writing major. I was scared to write my first poem. I was scared to submit my first short story. I was scared to begin my first novel. But I did all of it anyway. And now there are words inked into papers that I can call my own. They are messy, and flawed, and (yes) imperfect. But they are a start. When someone said “do it scared,” they meant it. Pick up the pen, even if your hands are shaking.