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What do you do when you’re convinced the writing you just finished is crap?

Well, it might be crap, but odds are that it’s not. Most writers are perfectionists at heart. We’re always searching for that perfect word, the exact phrase to convey the emotion we’re trying to get the reader to feel. We build worlds out of air and words and imagination and we want them to be real and interesting. Sometimes we put the bar pretty high for our lonely little words on paper. You should have high goals for your writing, but you should give your writing a little breathing room especially in first draft.

I find that if I start editing too severely in first draft that I can bring myself to a screeching halt. When I first started doing this for a living, I had so little time between working in corporate America that perfectionism didn’t rear its ugly head. But the picky beast did come to live in my office once I had time to write and was no longer working outside the house. It got so bad that I made a sign and put it on the wall by the door of the room, not directly above the desk but where I could glance up and see it if I needed to. The sign read, “Perfectionism is an unattainable goal.” The trick to it was that I spelled perfectionism wrong deliberately. So that every time I stopped myself trying to over edit in first draft I looked up and saw that sign. It stayed on my wall for years and was a visible reminder to get the hell out of my own way.

First draft is where you can experiment. Its where you can play. Its where you can be as bad as you need to be to get better. Let me share the 70/30 rule. It means that 70% of any first draft is garbage, but 30% is gold. The trouble is you must write the entire 100% to find that 30%. Its scattered throughout the 70% that doesn’t work. Somewhere around the 6th or 9th book the percentage of gold began to go up in first draft for me. I’ve had glorious books where 80% was gold and only 20% was garbage. But anytime I get caught up in beating myself up because its not working, or its not right, or its not – perfect I remember the 70/30 rule and it calms me down.

It’s a first draft, its not meant to be perfect. In fact if you write a first that you don’t cut or change anything on ever, then you are doing something wrong. The writers that don’t see the flaws in their own writing are the opposite problem of most of us, and I can’t help those “perfect” writers. They are seldom published, ever, because you must understand that not everything works. They’re happier with their writing, but in the end usually less successful than those of us who have black days of despair about our writing. We’ll get better, they won’t. To improve you must first understand that something needs improving.

When my head goes ugly, I am convinced that everything I write that day is crap. If I print I am killing trees to no purpose. I am in despair. Nothing works. Dialogue seems pointless, characterization false, descriptions flat, plot wanders around in circles. I’ve learned the most valuable thing I can do when my head goes that black; do not edit that day. Do not edit anything you’ve written on days like that, because you can’t see the writing. You’ve become the evil twin of the novice writer that thinks everything they write is golden. Just as they see all their writing as perfect, you see all your writing as horrible. Neither is true, I’d almost bet on that. The truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes, but while your head is trapped in the darkest of extremes leave your writing alone. You can write on days like that, but never, ever edit. Why do I say that?

Because I’ve edited on days when my head was so ugly inside that I hated it all, and the next day I reread what I’d left intact and it read great. There wasn’t that much wrong with it, and the parts I’d cut had to be rewritten, because I needed them and there’d been nothing that wrong with them to begin with, but I couldn’t see anything but flaws. So no editing when your head goes ugly. Step away from the computer, leave your office, and set the writing aside for a few hours, or a day. Most of the time when I come back to it, I find that it reads just fine. That in fact on days that I’m convinced my writing is terrible it usually isn’t. Sometimes days when I think something worked really well, I find the next day that though the scene flowed it doesn’t belong in this book. One of the good things about doing a series is that I have an out-takes drawer. I will periodically go through it for ideas or finally realize that the current book is where that long saved scene belongs. I make sure that I don’t ever want a scene before I delete it forever now. It doesn’t hurt to keep it as a file until the current book is put to bed. Better to have it and delete it later then delete it now and have to reconstruct it later.

So on days when your writing fills you with despair, go for a walk, hit the gym, eat lunch somewhere besides your kitchen. I find that fresh air, exercise, and a little change of scenery can do wonders for a dark mood. But the biggest tip I have is to wait until you’ve had some sleep and come back to the writing with a clearer eye. Most of the time I find that its not crap, it was just my head turning against me. The greatest asset you have as a writer is your imagination and your quirks. The greatest enemy you have as a writer is your imagination and your quirks. It is one of the great ironies of what we do that the very things that are our strengths can turn against us and destroy us, or we can tame the demons and hitch them to our wagon and make them work for a living. You can either make them work or let them eat you hollow with despair. I prefer my demons to have union cards, and work for a living.