The Happy Freelancer

This fall I started dancing again. Not in the “dance as though no one is watching” metaphorical way, but in the “attending dance classes and rehearsing my behind off” way. (For those who don’t know, before I was a writer I was a dancer but an injury forced me to cut my dancing career short.) Recently, in addition to learning the moves for a routine, I observed the class as a whole: How the 12 of us went from watching the instructor do something that seemed impossible, to tentatively trying it ourselves approximately 1000 times, to eventually getting most of the routine down (we still have to practice at home so we get the attitude just right).

And a thought hit me.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a dancer who would watch a full-length ballet and assume the ballerina learned the entire dance perfectly on the first try. They know she sweated bullets over it; that she practiced move after move and sequence after sequence, until her grande jetes seemed as effortless as breathing and her toes bled and her muscles ached and she didn’t have the energy to try even once more. She probably had moments where she doubted she could pull off the ballet–certainly at the start of the career, she did–and where even one more pirouette seemed impossible.

I think you can extend that the to audience in general, not just to the dancers. Aside from children, who take joy in the magic of ballet, most people wouldn’t assume that the dancers got the full ballet perfect on the first try. Even the audience knows that years of practice, discipline and training have gone into every move.

So why do we get it into our heads that writers get their books perfect on the first manuscript? I know there’s a difference between doing something physical and something mental, but I still think the comparison applies. We know that football players have gone over the same play repeatedly until it’s perfect, we know that doctors practice techniques for their surgeries, we know that pianists repeat their scales over and over again until their fingers feel as though they will fall off. We know that directors film movie scenes repeatedly until they see exactly what they want on their screen (otherwise, those funny outtake DVD extras wouldn’t exist, and who wants to live in a world without outtakes? Not this writer-dancer-outtake lover.)

So why do we expect that our book will be perfect without revision?

Most authors say in interviews that an enormous amount of revision was involved in their book. Sometimes a year’s worth of revisions or more go into a book. Some authors say that in revision new characters were added or characters were taken out. Some characters had their jobs or their gender or their age changed. Plot points were added. Chapters were moved around or omitted entirely. Secondary plots were changed. The point is that the book as published is often vastly different from the initial draft (with a few notable exceptions, which I think could have stood a few revisions.)

Still, many of us sit down to write our first book (or our first article) and after hours of work rip it up because it’s not good enough. Or we keep it but we lose sleep thinking about how terrible it is or what frauds we are. Or we think about writing the book but we avoid actually doing so because we’re afraid it just won’t be good enough. Even if we know intellectually that great writing involves revision, we’re still too afraid that what we put on paper won’t be perfect, so we don’t bother and we never find out what our book could have been.

I don’t know that there’s a simple answer to this. The obvious answer is to say, “Sit down, put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and just write. Don’t worry about what comes out of that,” but I know for some people it just isn’t as simple as that. Which is too bad, because I bet there are many great books just waiting to come out, but they never will because the author was too worried about perfection.

So, I’ll just say this. In honour of National Novel Writing Month I dare you all to sit down and work on your great novel (or article, or something else that should be written that you’ve been too afraid to get to). You don’t have to sign up for NaNoWriMo if you don’t want to, but challenge yourself to stop focussing on what you think you could go wrong and focus on what could go right–you could write a fantastic book.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dance routine to practice. And boy, do I need practice.