Think You Can’t Write? It’s Easy!
(If You Don’t Mind Persevering Through Your Bad Attempts)
Now and then I like to quote Bob Dylan. I think there is wisdom in his (sometimes cryptic) lyrics.
“She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.”
Dylan is a man who knows a thing or two about success, having recently sold the copyright for his back catalogue for an estimated $300 million.
Fear of failure combined with perfectionism can put you in a kind of deadlock where you don’t take the steps needed to get to where you want to go unless you can be sure of a successful outcome.
But the path to achieving any goal is littered with many failures.
And that is as it should be.
For example, you want to write some content for your business.
Because in our society we are, by and large, all literate you think: ‘ it’s just a bit of writing. How hard can it be?’ It seems as if this should be an easy win.
But then it turns out to be harder than expected, so you put it off.
I was talking to my older brother recently about this. He runs his own front end web development business. He posts articles on his website from time to time. He was frustrated because he could be walking down the street, thinking up the idea for a piece, and have all the points he wants to make, but when he goes to write them down what seemed fully formed just disappears.
How can that be? Why can’t he just sit down and write the whole article from start to finish?
The truth is, writing is not as easy as all that.
Then there is the misconception that some people are born ‘writers.’ Like the myth of the muse coming to you and sending out words magically through your fingertips, the reality it is more mundane.
Writing is neither ‘dead easy’ nor is it a gift ordained from God. Writing anything is a skill that can be learned.
With any new skill, every first attempt is rubbish. If you want evidence of that cast your mind back to your childhood and all those failed attempts. Maybe you fell off your bike several times before gaining your balance or - like me- got stuck in a tree before you learnt how to climb down as well as up. The next time, or time after that… you succeeded.
Writing is the same: it takes practice. Most people are not comfortable with writing cringe-worthy rubbish and seeing the stark evidence of their failures. They want to work through the steps, like a dot to dot picture. Nice and easy.
Somewhere along the way you lose your innate, childlike confidence and become self-conscious. Just watch a one-year-old learn to walk: he is pleased with himself even when he falls on his bottom!
Happy Kenny learning to walk in 2011.
When you start writing, first you have to get past the cliches and platitudes sitting on the surface of your mind. This material is made up of nonsense from the mainstream culture and other people’s ideas. It needs to be scraped away, dashed off in a flurry of writing before you can reach the good stuff and get the ideas flowing.
A friend of mine tells me that when we haven’t spoken for a while my flood of chatter is like me emptying my ‘recycling bin’ as all the words come out. That’s what the first draft of any writing is: your subconscious recycling bin.
And in that dustheap there may be a few diamonds. *
With writing, you fear putting a load of rubbish down on paper and then having to acknowledge it as yours. At least when learning something like riding a bike or playing the tuba there is (not much) physical evidence of your poor attempts.
Those pages of drivel can get you down if you let them. Don’t worry though because at least you have something to work on.
Jodi Picoult said: “You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.”
The trick is to keep showing up, putting down the words no matter how clunky or ill-formed.
This is humbling.
But essential work if you want to accomplish anything.
And perhaps you are only really prepared to face failure when it is something you value so highly that not trying would be worse.
Like parenting- all you lockdown homeschool parents, I see you! - is fraught with humbling moments, but you soldier on through your mistakes because long term the stakes are too high not to go ‘all in.’
This can be applied to any endeavour. No matter how much you want to do something ‘right’ and believe you have it in you to do a great job - there will always be a steep learning curve. And you will probably never reach perfection.
It’s good to have the ideal in your head - as a model to aim for. As long as you understand that in the real physical world failure is inevitable.
But in the same way, if you don’t write anything; if you don’t try and manifest any idea (teaching kids, baking a cake, building lego, starting a business, creating an offer) you will have nothing to edit or improve. And nothing to test against the real world i.e. your kids or your market.
And the more you write (or do anything) the more natural it becomes and fewer mistakes will be made. The more you fail, the more you succeed.
I guess Dylan understood this paradox. The one-year-old in you certainly does, so this means there is no excuse to start whatever it is you’ve been putting off.
Finally, I would like to point out that over time I have made a ton of copywriting mistakes so that I now have the skills to help you with great content for your business.
rachel@rachelhunterwriting.co.uk
* “If I stopped and took thought it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.” Virginia Woolf, 1919.