To Do Something Well
Step One: Be Terrible At It
"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
—G.K. Chesterton
I enjoy being good at stuff. Everybody does. Doing things well is fun and people are more likely to notice and appreciate your efforts if you don’t suck at whatever you’re doing. Like when you’re driving someone somewhere and you don’t kill them in a fiery car wreck because you’re good at driving. In my experience many people prefer that to the alternative.
Writing is the kind of thing people appreciate when you do well, whether they notice it consciously or not. Writing is also nice because when you don’t do it well it doesn’t matter and usually no one dies. No one has died from reading Shelf Life yet. Anyway: Forget about writing well. This article is not about writing well or how to get good at writing. This article is about why you should actively stop trying to get good at writing. And not just writing. Anything.
Once, when I was living in LA and playing in a flat-track roller derby league, a guy I was going out with suggested that he and I go roller skating. Was I good at roller skating? Not at all compared to my army of roller derby compatriots. Compared to the entire rest of the population of Planet Earth, though—yes, pretty good. I asked him if he knew how to skate. He said, and I quote, “I tried it a few times in middle school I think.” Reader, we were thirtysomething when this conversation took place.
To make a long and hilarious story short and topical, here are a few of the things I learned that day:
No man
In the history of men
Has ever
Wanted to do something he is bad at
On a date
With a woman who excels at it.
We did not stay long at the rink and never saw one another again.
The thing about roller derby—at least the thing that is relevant to the topic at hand—is that I started out terrible at it and never got good. I worked hard. I improved. I practiced three nights a week with the league. I improved more but it wasn’t enough to get good. I added an extra rink session each week to get more comfortable being in my skates. Not enough. I started outdoor trail skating. Not enough. I went to the gym five days a week before work to improve my overall cardio fitness and strength. Not enough. I improved and improved but nothing I did was enough to become good.
Never in my life have I worked so hard at something only to be so intensely mediocre. It was an amazing and invaluable experience. A++, would fail again. It was the first time I invested myself in something that didn’t come to me naturally. Normally if I try something and don’t get great at it right away, I give up and never speak of it again. Many are the hobbies I have left in my wake. Ask my partner how many abandoned knitting needles are lying around this house.
Shortly after my roller derby career ended, I set my mind to banging out a novel. I don’t think I would have completed the entire draft had I not been fresh off the experience of persevering at something even though I was terrible at it.
Writing isn’t something you become good at overnight. It’s definitely not something at which people are inherently good or bad. It’s a skill you have to hone. And the first step to being good at anything is being absolutely terrible at it—and doing it anyway. All. The. Time.
I mean, what is Shelf Life if not an effort to make myself write every day? I don’t do this for my health. Okay? This isn’t Health Life.
As I said earlier, this is not the article about choices you can make to improve your writing (forthcoming) nor about cultivating writerly habits (also forthcoming). This article is about getting over the reluctance to do something that you are not good at so you can keep doing it, every day, without getting discouraged. Will you get good if you do this? I don’t know! It’s not important! Again: I am encouraging you to actively stop trying to get good at writing.
You just started writing something. You knocked out a page, or a scene, or a draft. Is it good? Is it bad? How can you tell?
Most people don’t choose to read bad writing. When you sit down to read for pleasure, you’re not reading someone’s sloppy first effort. You’re not reading anything that even resembles a first effort. Let’s say you’re reading someone’s debut novel. That’s still not their first effort. It’s not even solely their effort. If it came through a trad publisher then you should assume that:
The author drafted it, and then
Revised it themself several times, and then
Got feedback from beta readers or an agent, and then
Revised it some more, and then
Received and implemented feedback from an acquiring editor, and then
Handed it off to a development or line editor who worked on it, and then
Handed it to a copyeditor who continued to refine it, and then
The author had another go at it to make sure it’s perfect, and then
A proofreader came behind them and made sure there wasn’t a single mistake.
All before it got to you to read. When you consume writing, you’re getting the end product of a long process to which the author and a team of experts devoted time and effort. But when you sit down to create some writing, whatever you generate is only the beginning of that process—the raw material. Comparing the writing you create to the writing you consume is unproductive. It’s like comparing rhubarb to rhubarb pie.
When I was playing roller derby, I wasn’t comparing myself to the women who started when I did or the women who, like me, worked full-time office jobs and played derby in their off time. I was comparing myself to the women who lived and breathed athletics. The women who earned their living as personal trainers, gym teachers, and nutritionists; who penciled other stuff in around exercise the way I scheduled exercise around everything else; who had come to the sport from a background of roller hockey or jam skating or skate dancing; who sweat Gatorade and dust protein powder off their thighs when they hop up from doing 100 burpees. I systematically worked out who were the very best players, and then I compared myself to them.
That’s a natural human impulse. We want to emulate what we admire and will always compare our own efforts to the efforts of those we aspire to be like and not to the efforts of—well, then, to what efforts should we be comparing our own? What writing can we use to evaluate our own writing to see if it measures up?
The only writing that exists today that your writing can benefit from being compared to is your own writing from yesterday. The only person’s writing or art that can tell you anything about the quality of your own writing or art is your own. Even if you have a writing buddy who is somehow, miraculously, at the same stage of writing development and relative skill level as you, you won’t achieve anything valuable by comparing your work to theirs.
You can compare a first draft from today to a first draft from last year. You can compare your third draft to your first. You can compare a revision after beta-reader input to the revision you did on your own. These are valuable, apples-to-apples comparisons that will give you real insight into your work and your refinement of the craft you practice.
Don’t despair if you’ve been writing for months or years or decades and you’re not where you want to be relative to the writing you read. Recognize the improvement that you make in your work over days, months, and years.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t:
Experiment with styles you encounter and admire
Have writing aspirations or dreams
Look for weaknesses in your writing and try to eradicate them
I’m only saying: Don’t worry or even think about getting good at writing (or anything else); just do it consistently and make sure that each time you do it you get at least a tiny bit better.
If you’re curious about the choices you can make to keep your writing improving, make sure you stay tuned because that article is on the docket for the days ahead.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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