I read a blog piece recently by a writer named Andy Bobrow from Community who wrote about the experience working with Dan Harmon. I think it was called How Writing for the TV Show Community Cured Me and it's about "Shit Writing Syndrome". It reads like it sounds. He talks about the experience of working with Dan Harmon and how his writing was shit. He asks Dan for the cure, but Mr. Harmon has none. He says everyone's writing is shit, there's about 2% in anything you write that's not shit. Your job as a writer is to take that 2%, throw out the other 98% of steaming feces, then rewrite. You find the 2% that's not shit from what you just rewrote and you repeat this process until you can get to an acceptable percentage of not shit.
Is it odd that the idea of this is inspiring?
In college, I took a playwriting class. The professor had mentioned a similar axiom. 90% of what you write will be crap, 10% has the potential to be good. But you can't get to that 10% without writing the 90% that's shit. Good to hear it again.
I'm inspired by this, because writing is just the act of failing over and over and over and over until one time you don't. Then you start a new project and you fail over and over and over and over until the piece reaches just above the point of failure. To write I have to give myself the room to fail. I've spent so much of my life afraid of failing that I don't write anything, or I write something and it's shit and I can't see past that horrible punch to the gut when I realize it's shit to find the 2% that's good. I stop before I can cut the rest and the keep writing and cutting and revising until the whole percentage reaches something acceptable to share.
At first it might seem disheartening to realize that such a large percentage of what you write is shit. But it's freeing. I don't have to worry about making everything great, rolling right up out the gate. Frankly it's likely impossible for me to accomplish. I can stop staring at the blank page wondering if what I'm about to write will be good until my writing time is up and I stand to leave the page still blank. I can just write. Review what I've done later, grab the 2% that's good and write more.
No the difficulty at that point is the hard work involved, the discipline to keep at it until the percentage seems acceptable. The difficulty is being completely brutal with words you invested time in writing, in stories you spent time constructing. To get what you want, to create, is hard work. No getting around it. It just is. And I have to choose the hard work. I often don't.
Back in February I was writing a short story on my Typewriter. I was still in the heady days after the New Year where I felt like I turned a new leaf, really dug in to change my life and work hard on my writing, pumping out short stories for practice. I had a great idea that seemed like a sexually awkward and hilarious story I could really have fun with. Once I started however, the sexually awkward made the story somewhat sad and painful to write. I was determined to finish, but it was a slog. As I finally brought it to a close something interesting happened. In the last two pages I rushed the ending, introduced a new character and stumbled upon one of the sweetest moments I never even would have thought of writing going into the story.
When I think of the story, I think of that final scene, the 2%, beyond the concept of the story itself, that I would like to take with me as I go to rewrite the story. It made writing the whole damn thing, slogging through page after page of painfully awkward sexual ostricizing of my main character, worth it. And in hindsight, I might not have even gotten to that scene if I hadn't written the whole thing. If I hadn't failed and failed and failed at writing a good story until finally something amazing actually hit the page. It's still a shit story overall, but now I know what the heart of the story is. I understand it better than I did when I had the idea of a bunch of sexually awkward and hilarious scenes.
I need to give myself space to fail. To learn. To accept the percentages and choose to work harder to achieve what I want. And now I leave you with a quote that's bordering on cliche as the business world continues to doll it up on their self-help propaganda. But it still helps my brain with the creative process.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”--Samuel Beckett
