I have always been into the idea of “shitty first drafts,” but, embarrassingly enough, I had not actually read the chapter of “Bird by Bird” that the phrase comes from. In fact, I had not read any part of “Bird by Bird,” which is itself an oversight, but come on, if I were reading books every day when would I find time to watch Magic: the Gathering videos on YouTube? Anyway, the essay is really good. You should read it. Here, I’ll even give you a link.

The essay is helpful, and funny, and does a really good job of explaining why one writes a shitty first draft, and reassuring the reader that it’s okay to do so. What it doesn’t do is explain how to write a shitty first draft. Maybe this is because Anne Lamott belives it’s self explanatory: to write a shitty first draft, you simply write something that is shitty, for the first time. Maybe it’s because the purpose of the essay is merely to inform people that it’s okay to write a shitty first draft, with the assumption that all people need is permission to let go of their perfectionism and they will simply do so. But for people like me, for whom perfectionism is about as easy to let go of as a live wire, it might take a little more.

I have known since I was very small that my perfectionism actively hindered my achievement. In first grade I was put in a remedial reading group because I insisted that — since I could not read novels meant for adults — I could not read at all. To this day, there is a petulant little child in me who would rather do nothing than do something suboptimally. I could theorize about why this is. But I have already spent a lot of time and money doing therapy about this, and in the end I have discovered that where this impulse comes from is much less interesting than what I can do about it. Here is what I do about it:

Don’t start – continue.

In college I had to write a lot of essays, and I often wrote them at the last minute because I needed the rest of my time for watching Magic: the Gathering videos on YouTube. The hardest part of those essays was always coming up with the first line. I would sit, sometimes for hours, trying to come up with something that would grab the readers’ attention, make them laugh, introduce my topic, and make a plate of delicious waffles. It never worked. So instead of doing that, I started button mashing. At the beginning of every essay, I would write my name and date, and then I would literally just roll my hands across the keyboard for a couple of seconds like I was having a siezure. Then I would add a period at the end of the “sentence.” Then I would write the second sentence of the essay, and go from there.

“I can go back later and write a better first sentence,” I would tell myself. In practice, I usually just ended up deleting the keyboard mashing and using the second sentence as the first sentence. It didn’t really matter either way. The point of the exercise was to skip over the part where the page was blank, by filling the top of the page with literal gibberish, so that I could get on with the actual work.

I still do a version of this, and it still gets me past the first line. But most written works are comprised of at least several lines, and I can’t button-mash my way through all of them. Once the initial euphoria of A New Thing wears off, I’m often left gazing up at a sheer wall of text without any text on it. What to do, then?

Don’t continue – conclude.

When I stop writing, whether it’s for the day, or just to take a break, I try not to stop at the end of a thought. Whether it’s a new chapter in a book, or a new paragraph in a blog post, starting a brand new thing on a brand new day is a recipe for crippling neurosis. Instead, I’ll stop in the middle of a chapter, the middle of a paragraph — hell, the middle of a sentence if I’m feeling spicy.

My brain may hate starting things, but it loathes not finishing things. If I do not allow myself to finish a thing before stepping away from it, I know that some small part of my brain, a tiny mind-goblin, will continue fiddling with that loose end until he’s figured out how to knit a sweater with it. And then I’ll sit back down to write, and there will be a sweater waiting for me. I still have to turn the sweater into words, but that’s the risk you run when you mix metaphors.

This works from the other direction too: if I’m banging my head against a particular paragraph, and if I’m mindful enough to realize that’s what I’m doing, I just stop. I go do something else — wash the dishes, or play with the cat, or watch Magic: The Gathering videos on YouTube. I don’t have to worry that I won’t come back to the writing later, because my particular neurosis means I have to come back to it later — maybe not the same day, but eventually.

By stumbling forward in this way, I’m able to make it through the bulk of the writing process. Unfortunately, there’s still the matter of actually finishing a thing, which is the bit which my perfectionism resists the most. So once again, I have to make a mental substitution:

Don’t conclude — get to the end.

I have a book coming out early next year. It took me a long time to write because it was a very ambitious project and I initially had no idea what I was doing. There is a part near the end of the book that is VERY complicated and VERY ambitious, and there was a period of some weeks where I had no idea how to land it. And because I had no idea how to land it, I couldn’t even bring myself to start it. It’s hard to jump out of a plane when you’re not sure whether you’re wearing a parachute.

What I did, eventually, is give myself an exercise: I made myself write the entire sequence as if I were a five-year-old explaining an action sequence from a transformers movie. “And then the good guy comes out of the ocean in a big wet car with a gun on it and it goes BOOOOOOOM” and so on. I knew I wasn’t going to use the five-year-old version in my manuscript — it was too shitty even for a shitty first draft — but it allowed me to write to the end of the scene.

Basically, I try not to get hung up on landing the plane. Sometimes I just crash the plane into the ground and come back later to comb through the wreckage. I shovel the details from my patchy outline into the manuscript, and hit save, and tell myself I’ll come back and tidy it up in the second draft. Sometimes I even do!

The important thing is to get to the end, whatever I have to tell myself. Because once I’ve made it to the end, once I’ve “gotten it down,” as Lamott says in her essay, the task of writing becomes ENTIRELY different. It transforms from an additive process to a subtractive one, from painting to sculpture. For me, at least, that resets the clock on my exhaustion — the new task gives me new energy. I just have to trick myself into getting there.

If this all sounds like an elaborate campaign of self-deception, well-spotted. I lie to myself at the beginning, by telling myself it’s actually the middle. I lie to myself in the middle, by telling myself it’s actually the end. I lie to myself at the end, by telling myself the ending isn’t all that important. There’s nothing inherently wrong with deception. We lie to children all the time, for their own good, or just because it’s funny. Why not lie to ourselves for the same reasons? After all, isn’t perfectionism a self-deception all on its own? The mistaken belief that my ideas are so important and good that they don’t even deserve to exist if I can’t express them flawlessly? In the face of that horse shit, I think lying to myself is an act of ultimate justice.

I want to be clear, because I fear it may get lost in all of this: I genuinely enjoy writing. I like finding unusual ways to say things. I like making myself laugh, and sometimes cry. I like wrestling with story puzzles and inventing goofy characters. And ideally, if I had all the time and all the money in the world, I would like to engage in a writing process free from self-deception, a zenlike routine where I give myself as much time as I need, and go on a lot of walks, and occasionally appear on podcasts or actual play DnD series so that people remember who I am. That’s not the world I live in. For better or for worse, I have to finish my stories relatively quickly, and I have to do it between all of the other shit that’s important to me.

This means that, unavoidably, there will be some pain. But I’ve decided the pain is worth it, because it’s getting me closer to something I adore. And, more importantly, I’ve found as many ways as I can to make it not so painful. Because if it was just pain, if the pain was greater than the joy, that would be a very strong signal to stop doing what I’m doing, and do something else. This is very important. I do not want anyone to come away from this thinking that my advice is “tell yourself whatever lies you need to hear to keep you grinding away at your joyless project forever.” What an unhinged position to take. No thank you.

All I’m trying to do is share the ways I’ve managed to trick myself into letting me write. I’ve used them all in this post, in fact. I just went up and deleted the first paragraph of this post (which originally began, “Writing is hard and bad and you shouldn’t do it if you have anything else going on.”) Every time I was called away to do something else, I made sure to leave in the middle of a paragraph, with maybe a sentence-worth of notes about what I was planning to say next. And now that I’m here at the end, rather than coming up with something clever or pithy to say, I’m just going to end it.