Back then the idea of becoming a published writer was still fairly abstract. It was a dream only, something I hoped would happen someday in my future, but I knew without any shadow of a doubt I wasn’t prepared for it by Christmas of 2005.
Granted, I had written quite a bit by then, with five books and six screenplays under my belt, including the one I had optioned. But it was clear that having anything published or produced was still pretty far into the future. (Six years to be exact.) I had a lot to learn. And I had a lot more work to do.
Steven decided I shouldn’t have to wait to see my name in print, and decided that for Christmas, he’d have one of my books professionally bound. Normally this would be a killer present for an unpublished author. And it would have been, had it not been for one teeny tiny problem.
The reason I just knew I would hate it was because of the version of the book he chose to–pardon the pun–immortalize. He decided he wanted to use the first draft of my novel, MY IMMORTAL, which I had written the year before for Nano.
This was how I managed to figure out what he was up to, no matter how sly he thought he was being. He had to get this draft from me somehow, and, like most writers, I was quite unwilling to give it up.
This made me 100% certain I’d hate the gift when he finally presented it to me.
By then I had worked through subsequent drafts, so I knew just how badly written that first draft was. You never realize that at the end of the draft, when you crawl, bloody and broken, over the finish line, with just enough stamina to thrust your fist in the air like you're stuck in a John Hughes movie.
I told him, ever so gently, in my sweet Southern way, that a snowball had a better chance in hell than he did getting that first draft. It, like every other first draft in existence, sucked way too much to be published as it was.
But he was insistent. He didn’t seem to care that this draft sucked the big one, and how much it would physically pain me to revisit it even if it was hardbound in leather. He wanted to honor my accomplishment of writing a book, any book, even a sucky one.
One thing you should know about my husband. When he decides he wants to do something a certain way, he’s fairly obnoxious about it. Personally I think that’s why we get along so well. We’re both the kind of people that, when we dig our heels in, it’s because we really, really, really believe in what we are doing, making us impossible to deter.
Long story short: he badgered me until I caved.
Finally I just plugged my nose and handed over that stinky, cruddy, awful, error-filled, verbose, overwritten, hastily written piece of suckatude and let him do his thing. It clearly meant more to him than it did to me, and letting him do what he wanted was kind of my Christmas gift to him.
I was certain I’d have to feign any kind of enthusiasm for the gift all the way up until I opened the box and saw the book for the first time.
I didn’t know how badly I wanted to see my name in print until the first time I did. I promptly burst into tears, deciding in about a second that this was the best gift ever.
That book has had a special place on our bookshelf every year since.
Now ask me how many times I’ve cracked it open to read it. Ask me how many times anyone has read it. I’ll give you a hint; it’s the same number.
It’s also the same number of people will be able to read it going into the future.
You’re basically going to have to pry the book out of my cold, dead hands, because no one gets to read it while there is still breath in my body. Nope. Nada. Can’t help you. No one is ever going to read it. Ever, ever, ever.
Why?
It sucked.
Even though it was book #4, written 23 years after that first Halloween writing assignment, it sucked. Even though I live-blogged it as I wrote it, publishing a chapter a day with minimal editing for a wide MySpace audience, who read along enthusiastically, enthralled by the sophomoric attempt, as well as my ambitious endeavor to write a book in a month, it sucked.
It sucked, it sucked, it sucked.
It sucked because it was a first draft. It sucked because, even with those 23 years, four novels and six screenplays under my belt, I was still figuring out who I was as a writer. It sucked because I was feeling my way along, trying and discarding new ideas, experimenting, and, more often than not, falling right on my face.
Fortunately that’s what those first few books are for. They exist for the sole purpose of learning how not to suck. It’s a gauntlet, if you will. An obstacle course you must navigate in order to get better.
Ironically, that’s also the reason that so many people never turn “I wish,” into “I did.”
Too many writers are afraid to suck.
Worse, we like to give them a gold star for it. We nod in agreement that writing a bad book is a waste of time. Too many bad books exist already, written and even published by those who clearly aren’t as self-aware as these careful, thoughtful writers who respect the process way too much to do something as heinous as write a bad book. On purpose. Anyone who would willingly write a sucky book is obviously a hack looking to make a fast buck, someone who doesn’t take the process seriously. Somewhere along the line we decided it showed disciplined when a writer recognized his or her limitations and curbed their enthusiasm to write accordingly.
Funny thing about writing within such limitations. It doesn’t give you much room to grow.
The best gift that Steven gave me that year was the permission to suck. It was okay. It was necessary.
No matter what you do in life, you're usually not going to ace it on the first try. In my book BACK FOR SECONDS, my heroine had to start her life over after a bitter, unexpected divorce. She threw herself into her cooking, where she used the challenge of creating delectable treats that were iced to perfection to renew her confidence. She didn't succeed the first try. In fact there was one notable scene where she had a minor meltdown, crushing those cookies into a fine powder because she couldn't get it right, not the way she wanted it.
The bigger your dream, the higher your standards.
Like anyone else who has accomplished anything great, she didn't use that suckatude as an excuse to stop. She saw it as an opportunity to get better, to learn from her mistakes. She didn't stop just because she sucked. She kept going, because perfecting this task meant more to her.
Writing a sucky book doesn't mean you don't care about or respect the process. It means you're not about to let something as temporary as sucking stop you from doing what it is you want to do.
And it didn’t stop me, at all, from seeing my dream realized. In fact, it inspired me to work a lot harder on the next book, just so it would suck less. It was the only way I’d see my name in print “for real.”
Writing a great book starts with writing rotten ones, and that’s just the truth. The first book you write will always be the worst book you write, even if you’re a writing prodigy. Raw talent likely got you into the game, but only skill can take you from a wide-eyed wannabe to an accomplished author. The only way you gain that skill is through experience. Lots and lots of experience. To learn how to write you must write… and you must write a lot. Even if it’s bad. Even if it sucks. You have to crawl before you learn how to walk and all that.
Don't take my word for it. The great Stephen King has said there are only two things you need to do to become a writer. Read a lot and write a lot.
Most of us can handle the reading part. A wordsmith typically starts as a bibliophile. We love everything about the written word. We consume all types of books and absorb all sorts of things from all types of stories and storytellers, even when we’re not aware that’s what we are doing.
Indeed, many writers start their journey assimilating what they’ve read and trying to duplicate it, which is one of the reasons so many of those first few attempts suck so badly. It’s not completely genuine or authentic. You’re simply rehashing what you’ve read in the past, forcing it through your own inexperienced filter until it resembles anything even remotely bookish.
That’s how it happened for me, anyway.
It’s kind of inevitable, really. When you’re a new writer, you’re still figuring out who you are. You have an idea what you want to say, and you lean on all the books you’ve ever read to show you how to say it.
And that’s great. You should read a ton of books. Lots and lots.
The more you read, the better you’ll write. It’s inevitable.
But here’s the part about that lesson we all miss. We are often spared all the yucky, sucky parts. We don’t get to see the first fledgling drafts of these novels, the ones that the publishers or agents said, “Yeah… it’s a’ight, but we’re going to have to put some work into it before it can go to market.”
Every great book has gone through some sort of editing process, which exists solely to minimize the suckatude. What you hold in your hand is a finished product. It is not where that writer started, not by a long shot.
We’ve all been judging our first efforts by the finished product of others as if they are the same thing, and they’re just not.
This sets up an unrealistic expectation for your own work. When you produce your first draft and you realize yourself that it doesn’t stand up to all the books you’ve read, it can be a real killjoy that will strike you right in the heart of your insecurities. This can make you shelve your projects, hidden away in some dark drawer, never to see the light of day, because you’d be mortified if anyone knew just how badly you suck. You need to be aware of and recognize your limitations, and amend yourself accordingly.
That’s how I always approached it, anyway.
Maybe that was why I could write five books and six screenplays and still be horribly mortified by the suckatude. I valued perfection over progress, and really didn’t get anywhere as a result.
It’s a sobering discovery when you learn that no matter how badly you want that gold star, or to be recognized for your spark, that bright creative genius we’ve talked about time and again, that thing that makes you special and sets you apart from everyone else, you start out sucking every bit as much as everyone else.
Every creative type will struggle with this at some point, particularly at the beginning of their careers. This is when you suck harder than you will ever suck.
At some point your inexperience will frustrate you, because you will not be able to do your brilliant ideas justice.
Yeah. That happened to me.
Nothing shuts your dreams down faster. Many writers are unwilling, and often discouraged, from writing a bad book, even when it’s a necessary part of writing a great one.
Ray Bradbury once advised writers to write 52 stories over 52 weeks, contending that it is impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row. Like any underdeveloped muscle, you have to work it out in order to get the kind of results you want. No one wakes up with a six-pack just because they really, really want them. You have to put in the time. You have to do the work.
It is in the suckatude that you learn how not to suck. And every single writer has gone through this process, whether you got to see it or not.
Even the great Harper Lee, whose book “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an award-winning classic that sustained her entire career on only one novel, sucked at first. When she sent in the book that would become TKAM, it wasn’t ready for publication at all. It had a spark of genius, but it was mired in just enough suckatude to throw the brakes on the whole thing until they could fix it.
You didn’t get to see that part. You didn’t get to see the long hours of sitting in front of a typewriter, toiling over each word choice. You didn’t get to see the back and forth with the editors, where Ms. Lee worked over the period of two years to turn that sow's ear into a silk purse. All you see is the polished, award-winning classic sitting on the bookshelf. Every word she wrote was not, as it turns out, pure gold, and she needed a little help from other people to learn how to shake off the suckatude.
As we all do.
Every new writer will ultimately face this. You’re going to suck. I sucked. Stephen King sucked. Harper Lee sucked. We all had to start somewhere in order to learn how not to suck.
Since everyone assumes that anything written in 30 days must suck by default, I say use Nanowrimo as your excuse to suck… with style.
Since you can't avoid it, you might as well learn to embrace the suckatude. Go into each writing session knowing that you might suck that day, but that’s okay. If you keep at it, day by day, word by word, you’re going to suck a little less by month’s end, simply because you’re working out that muscle.
Not every word you write will drip with honey. My typical book runs anywhere from 80,000 – 100,000 words, and of those words, there are probably ten to twenty really great passages, the kind that are so good they actually make me question whether I could have written them. When I edit the work, however, I’m ready to throw about 70% of it back, endlessly tweaking and fidgeting to get it just so.
In fact, much of your output will frustrate you. It is not an easy thing to arrange words on a page. Often they will feel inadequate in the sheer scope of what you're trying to do. Writing a book is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise most likely hasn’t written one, particularly one that doesn’t suck. (Because that's even harder.)
Writing anything is hard, short format, long format, doesn’t matter. Every word you cast onto the page is like a piece of spaghetti flung on a wall. You never know what is going to stick until it does. It is a learning experience as you struggle to find “the right” word, or the right combination of words. You’ll find yourself scowling every single time you write the word “said,” because it won’t properly convey the emotion of the scene, which you feel should be transcribed to the letter. You’ll refer to your thesaurus more than once, to find a prettier word, a more writer-y word, to say what you want to say with style, ultimately exhausting every synonym for said in the space of a chapter. You’ll stare at a paragraph for an hour, thinking it’s clunky and confusing, but unsure how to whittle it down into something more succinct and concise. You’ll change sentence order, you’ll fiddle with sentence structure; you’ll delete words and insert words, only to wipe away the whole passage entirely in a fit of impotent despair.
In fact, this chapter itself feels sucky to me. Thanks to real life stuff, I’m up earlier than usual. Since I have a deadline to meet, I decided to get my daily writing requirement out of the way early. This forces me to write when I don’t feel my brain is firing on all cylinders. Each word feels inadequate. Nothing is flowing like I want it to flow.*
Believe me, as a writer you’re every bit as aware of when you get it right as when you get it wrong. You’ll feel it down to your bones.
You’ll be painfully aware when you suck, even decades into your writing career. Some days you just need to write through the suckatude, knowing that no matter how bad it is, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
That’s what the rewrite process is for.
That this is happening on the day I had outlined to talk about sucking actually works out perfectly, so you can see that yes… it can suck… but you will both move past it and learn from it. I may feel like I’m forcing every word this morning, but it’s not stopping me from getting the words onto the page. Deadlines don’t go away just because you can’t find the right word. Use “said,” and move on. Put the pieces in place. You can fiddle with getting them perfect later. It’s your job to keep plodding along, installing the space for your chapter, knowing that when you go back through it later, you can address whatever weaknesses you felt were there and make it stronger, even if it’s rewriting the thing entirely.
Suckatude is no excuse to stop. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to complete your first draft, regardless of if it sucks.
Spoiler: it’s going to. Like I said, first is always worst, even within specific projects.
Here’s the thing, though. You have permission to suck. It’s okay. It’s necessary. Once you learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff by doing it on a regular basis, you’re going to suck a whole lot less.
You just need to muster the courage to be imperfect for a while.
Writers who are afraid of sucking usually never write their way out from under it. Writers who realize that sucking is an inherent part of the process will inevitably use each and every failure to climb out of the suckatude, building a skillset that will take them wherever they need to go. This comes from learning what not to do every bit as learning what to do.
The best education I ever got in screenwriting came from joining websites where other newbies like me could share our work and engage in peer-to-peer reviews to polish our screenplays. This started with Zoetrope, a virtual studio for Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, one where writers can both give and receive feedback to refine their craft.
Back when I started, you had to review something like three screenplays in order to submit one of your own. Sounds simple enough, right?
That’s what I thought too, until I realized that these were not the polished screenplays that actually made it to the screen, not by a long shot. These were early drafts from clueless, new writers, many of whom were at different developmental stages of their career, which often made it a chore to get through.
In a very real way, you stop reading for pleasure when you start writing professionally. You start picking things apart. You’re more critical. You can spot where things hit the mark and when they fall flat. You’ll do this all the time, even when you don’t realize you’re doing it. You’ll do it for published/produced material, things that were deemed OK to release to the masses. And you’ll most definitely do it in peer-to-peer reviews, where you are tasked with helping your fellow writer get one step closer to that ultimate goal of being sold.
If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend finding a writer group and adding this to your to-do list. By reading only published/produced material, you’re only getting half the picture. You need to see what doesn’t work every bit as what does. This way you’ll more easily spot the flaws and the problems in your own writing.
That wasn’t the real challenge, though. The real challenge was finding a positive and constructive way to break down the screenplay and tell the writer what didn’t work as well as what did. This requires knowledge of what makes a sucky book or screenplay suck so hard, and you can’t really identify those things without being familiar with both good material and bad material.
You must educate yourself about those things, especially if you’re a new writer yourself. It’s not enough just to decide you don’t like something, which might work for a casual reader but is never excusable for someone who wants to be a professional. You need to identify why you didn’t like it. You have to break it down. You have to solve it, kind of like a riddle. Maybe the first and only thing you can think of is, “Well. It sucked.” But that writer can’t do too much with that. Did it suck because you have personal biases you took into it? Maybe it was juvenile humor and you don’t like juvenile humor. Maybe the main character is unlikable. This often boils down to personal preference, but technical execution can also play a part. Did it suck because it was improperly formatted? Did it suck because it bored you, indicating there might be something wrong with the pacing?
Be specific. Why did it suck? What went wrong?
When you learn to answer these questions, you’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls in your own writing.
This is why it’s kind of necessary to suck.
The challenge, then, is learning how not to suck. This comes from fearless experimentation and relentless repetition. Every writing session is a workout, flexing and training your creative muscle so that one day, over time, it becomes toned and refined. Just like going to the gym to train your body, some days you just have to grin and bear it as you write word after inferior word, no matter how frustrated you might be that you’re not quite communicating the message the way you want to. You can’t see the progress because you’re mired down in the swamp of suckatude, wading through the muck every single time you have to write a bunch of crappy paragraphs you just know you’re going to have to whittle down later into something more palatable. And, just like the gym, you’ll discover that the more you flex that muscle, the more confidence you will develop over time. After a month, or six months, or a year, you’ll finally see the progress in your body, turning it into the masterpiece you always knew it could be.
You write enough words, you’ll find that they suck less and less. Like Mr. Bradbury said, it’s impossible that they’re all bad, or that they will all suck, if you just keep going.
But you’ll never get to that place as long as you use the fear of sucking as an excuse not to try.
Leaning a bit harder on the fitness analogy, I’ll put it this way. I am a big girl. My body is not where I want it to be. In order to get where I want to be, I know I’m going to have to put in a whole lot of work. This isn’t something I can finish in 30 days, or even six months, maybe even one year. To get to where I want to go, I’ll have to exercise when I don’t feel like it. I’ll have to say no to yummy food when I really want it. I’ll have to use enormous amounts of discipline I currently don’t possess, or at least utilize for that particular task. If I want something different, I’m going to have to do something different. It’s the only way to get in fighting shape as it were.
Because this task is so overwhelming, and the demands of which are daunting, my first human instinct is to make excuses not to try. This irrational fear is wagers my success against how likely it is I will fail. The odds are not stacked in my favor. Most people have been perpetually dieting in some form or another for decades and still struggle with it. I know that the road ahead of me is not an easy one, and it’s inevitable that I will suck at meeting this challenge.
This past year, I dedicated myself to a fitness journey. I had hoped to make a huge dent in the weight I had to lose, but I only lost 23 pounds. I have plenty of excuses on why I sucked at transforming my body. I don’t want to join a gym. I don’t like working out in front of anyone, much less the kind of people who have already mastered the kind of discipline I haven’t yet developed. Even in my own house, I have to have absolute privacy to work out, which I often don’t have.
But I want that privacy because I don’t want to feel inadequate. No one does.
Whether I worked at this goal or not, the time passed regardless. Here it is a year later and I’m not all that much closer to my goal than I was when I started.
If in another year I’m still in the same exact spot I am now, I have no one to blame but myself. I could have dared to fail, dared to suck, dared to be inadequate and work through it, or I could choose not to. (Like every OTHER year of my life.)
In other words, if I’m not where I want to be, it’s kind of my choice.
To do anything of any importance, from the time you learn to walk to the time you dare to fly, you have to be willing to suck.
And if you want to do something big, you have to be willing to suck just as epically.
My son Timothy once said to me, “Your discipline must match your ambition.” This is absolutely 100% true. If you want to write a great book, you need the discipline to churn out a few stinkers along the way. You have to hold your nose and power through those books that will never sell in order to get to the ones that will.
The more you write, the more you’ll be able to tell the difference.
It’s going to take some time, but that’s okay. The time is going to pass either way. It’s up to you how you use it. You can develop that creative muscle and get yourself in fighting shape, or you can shrug it off and let the time pass without doing one damn thing to improve. The bad news is that we all suck at the beginning.
The better news is that we can improve drastically if we dare to write anyway.
The best news it that there’s no downside to writing books that suck. So your book sucks. So what? Shelve it and start on the next one, which I can guarantee you will suck a little less.
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever use the suckatude as an excuse to stop writing. Only writing itself will get you past this awkward, ugly, inadequate phase that every single writer before you has found themselves in.
Not everyone will get past it.
But you can.
And you should.
So go forth and suck, my lovelies. Write stinkers of sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books. Line your walls with the page after inadequate page. Let every awkward word mock you from the screen, challenging you–daring you–to work through the crap in order to reach your full potential.
And one day, when you’re a huge success, and people are clamoring to know your secret, you can just smile wide and tell them, “I wasn’t afraid to suck.”
*As you can see from the time taken to revise this chapter, as well as the jump in the word count, I did fidget with this one a little more than the rest, simply because it sucked, and I didn't care to post it live in the condition it was in. It still isn't perfect, but I'll be able to move on to my next chapter tomorrow. In the rewrite process, who knows what might happen? I might scrap it entirely.
Odds are, however, I'll just tighten it up and sharpen the message of the content. At least the basic ideas are in place, and that's all I needed to move forward.
It still kinda sucks, but that's okay. Most of what we write is not carved in stone, so suckatude is a temporary state at best.
But that's a lesson for another day.
Started First Draft: November 6, 2015 8:31am PST
Completed First draft: November 6, 2015 10:57am PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,503
Completed revisions: November 6, 2015 1:15pm PST
Updated WC: 4,776/22,300
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