Getting it wrong is part of getting it right. – Charles Handy
Week after week I’d set pen to paper and wind up discouraged and embarrassed.
I had joined a writers group when we were still all getting together and no one had yet heard of COVID. The facilitator would give us a prompt, or a picture, and give us ten minutes to write. Then a few brave members would share what they wrote.
I was never one of those intrepid souls.
Ernest Hemingway wrote and rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. You’ll never believe what had him stumped. He said the problem was “getting the words right.”
Long ago, I taught an introductory knitting class. Inevitably, there would be one or two new knitters who would get frustrated when they had to rip their work out for the third of fourth time.
That’s when I’d let them in on a secret. The only difference between beginning knitters and experienced knitters is that an experienced knitter knows she’s going to be ripping her work out multiple times.
R & D labs are the birthplace of many ideas that don’t pan out.
Evolution has shown us that homo sapiens didn’t spring up in its perfect form on the first mutation.
Who met the love of their life in junior high and never needed to date anyone else? Who still has the first job they ever took? Who is still using those same signature dance moves from way back when?
Which of us is proficient at anything the first time we try?
So why are we so reluctant to value our mistakes? Our shitty first drafts? Why can’t we be more like an R and D lab?
Mistakes are an essential part of an engaged life. A necessity.
No, no one wants to fail publicly. And knowing that we all do from time to time is cold comfort.
But we can learn to be more comfortable with our less-than-flawless efforts.
The first step is to not think everyone else’s efforts are perfect the first time.
They’re not.
The second is to not believe ours should be.
And so whenever I start a writing project, I take the advice of a member of the writers group I was in and I name it Shitty First Draft. It reminds me that I’m not the exception. That to create something of quality, I will have to change things, revise, and edit. Because getting it wrong is part of getting it right.