Writing as a mentality

No one’s ever naturally good at anything. Not even the famous writers of the classics of days past, nor the modern-day Medium writers.

I’ve tried to jumpstart my writing habit so many times, ever since high school. I’ve had so many blogs over the years, from high school to college — all of them failed. They failed because I always tried to be a perfectionist: I needed to get the tone right, to get the right flow and catchiness. So every time I would write something, I would second-guess my writing, or edit it to hell, then throw it in the draft bin.

I’ve never been happy with the stuff I write. Recently I’ve come across an article called Art and Fear where the author argues that:

“Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. Inevitably, your work will be flawed.”

Writing can be considered an art form (it’s no science, or I’d probably actually be good at it), and something that can only be improved through repetition and through cranking out shitty pieces of writing until it’s “good enough.”

There’s a story (I have no idea whether it’s true) about a potting class in which the teacher splits the class in half: one half is to make one “perfect” pot and the other is to make a certain quantity of pots, but the group that made the higher quantity of pots came out better. Again, this is probably urban legend at this point, but it holds a kernel of truth. It also coincides with the notion of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule — you spend that many hours at something and you’re bound to be good at it (though this myth was dispelled by a study).

But it still makes sense though, that I’ll need to practice; to keep producing terrible writing in order to get better at it.

Tally ho!