Video: “Dare to Suck”

Writers, if you suffer from perfectionism, you MUST watch this video!

God bless Maureen Johnson! Consider her words to be the Gospel truth. In fact, you can read a transcription of the video here:

A lot of you had questions about writing, and you left them in the comments, and I thought today I was going to do some questions. So let’s get right to it.

Question: “I really want to write but I’m afraid that I suck. How can I get over this fear that I suck?”

I’m going to tell you something that’s going to run contrary to what you normally think as nerd-fighters. As nerd-fighters you want to decrease World Suck. But what I’m going to tell you today is that you should Dare to Suck.

Let me let you in on a little secret. When you are learning to write, you are going to suck. You are going to suck a lot. You’re just going to keep sucking for a while, and feel like you’re sucking, and actually that’s a sign that you’re completely on the right path. Because when you are learning things, you suck at them. Imagine you went down the street and you bought a violin. You wouldn’t just bring it home and automatically say to all your friends, “Hey, I bought a violin. You want to hear me play?” No. You would go and you would practice for like eight to ten years and then you would be like, “Hey, I’m playing at Carnegie Hall. Look at me go.” You have to suck first.

There are some things you really aren’t supposed to suck at. Like, for example, I really suck at crossing the street at roundabouts in England. I mean, if you suck at that, that can have serious consequences. In writing, there are no real serious consequences to sucking.

You know, you don’t have to be afraid that the first thing you turn out is going to be a huge masterpiece, or it’s going to be that big novel that makes a billion zillion dollars. Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry that it’s not good. Nobody- that’s the great thing about writing and not publishing right away — you can write tons of stuff that sucks.

This is precisely why when people write to me when you’re, you know, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen and you say, “I’ve written a book. I write stories all the time. i wanna publish them. How can I do that.” I say, “No, don’t do it, not yet, stop. Because you haven’t sucked enough yet.” And you may be thinking, “No, I do, I really really suck. You’re underestimating how much I suck, Maureen.” But I’m not. You haven’t sucked loooooong and hard enough. (Did I actually say that?)

Trust me, sucking is not just part of the learning process. It’s part of the professional process as well. First drafts, like the one I turned in at one o’clock this morning, basically exist to suck. They’re wrong. They’re the first pass. They’re my first attempt at the story. And they’re going to get changed and ripped apart. I mean, lots of writers I know, we sit and we laugh about the incredible sucktitude of our first drafts. But you have to go there and you have to try stuff out and you have to suck at it big time.

Have you heard this phrase, “Writing is rewriting?” Well it’s a hundred percent true. You don’t just write something once and then you’re done. You write it and it sucks. Then you write it and write it like five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, whatever times, and *then* you’re done and it goes from ‘suck’ to ‘sort-of-kind-of-suck’ and then it kind of goes all the way to ‘awesome,’ and that’s the journey. It goes from ‘suck’ to ‘awesome.’

There are some other bits, but that is more or less it.

It’s good to say it out loud. Say it with me now. It feels good. One, two, three, “I give myself permission to suck.”

I like to run this every so often as a friendly reminder to push back against perfectionism.

You can find Maureen Johnson’s books here.

And here is her blog.