Imagine you are sitting down, and an idea comes to your head for a story or a subject that you are excited to write about. What happens after you get that idea, that light bulb moment? Do you quickly sit down, create it, and let it out for the world to see, or are there some lingering internal battles that begin flaring up?
The Writer’s Doubts
Starting at a young age, many of us were taught to never give less than perfect or to ensure our work was as close to perfect as possible. There was no success in “less than” what was expected (i.e., perfection), and therefore perfectionism was instilled in everything in our everyday lives, including our crafts, our hobbies, our free worlds.
Many of us felt “unworthy” in some way because we were unable to create to the expectations of others (which we interpreted as perfection), and our labels of ourselves are “less than” cause us to reject or shy away from any success or feelings of accomplishment from our work.
The Writer’s Truths
We have permission to be free in our creativity. We do not have to have special degrees or training—truth be told, there is no specific “right way” of doing it. There is no specific schedule that you have to follow. There is no perfection that has to be achieved on the first try (or ever). Growth and success, and even greatness, do not start off with us being perfect. They come from a place of awfulness. A place where we just really suck. A place of writing through our own array of emotions. It’s how our lives are impacted, so why can’t our stories be impacted this way as well?
Your Permission Slip
The secret is, no writer is perfect. No one has ever or will ever create the perfect piece, even with a team behind them helping them. So go ahead and give yourself permission to write whatever you want. Give yourself permission to be raw, pour all of your emotion and chaos. Make the biggest mess. Make garbage, then come back and move it around. Mold it, play with it, build it. Forgive yourself, and then feel proud of yourself. I’ve said before on this show that if you feel pulled to write if you feel called to write, then you have permission to write. If you need it to be official, I hereby give you a permission slip that says you have permission to write.
There is no specific class, path, or way of writing, otherwise, we would all be writing the same stories. There would be no climax in a story, there would be no questions or anything that would tie you into a world to escape it. Here is your permission slip, your permission slip to suck but then also permission to grow, to become, to thrive, to succeed, and to simply enjoy your craft, and to fill your personal needs.
Speaking of needs, I need your help this season. We are coming up on our 100th episode. Man, what a journey this has been! I want to know what you want to see in the 100th episode. Every one of you has a part in this journey, you have been a huge part of my seasons, and I would love your input.
Tell me your thoughts.
I would love to know, do you feel like you have permission to write? Do you feel like you have permission to call yourself a writer? Do you feel like you have permission to suck at writing? And do you feel like that’s a good thing?
Full Episode Transcript (click to expand!)
This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 97: Permission To Suck.
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and I know firsthand that writers struggled with a lot of things, because I have struggled with a lot of things myself. And a lot of the struggling comes from the creative process, but a lot of it also comes outside of the creative process. A lot of that struggle comes from the identity that comes with writing, and creating, and being a writer, and a lot of that struggle with identity comes from wrestling with whether or not we have permission to do something.
So for example, a lot of us struggle, first and foremost, with feeling like we have permission to write. Maybe we don’t have what we think of as the right degree, the right kind of training, the right background, the right circumstance, the right privilege. Maybe we’ve been told outright that we do not have permission to write. We’ve been told that we’re no good. We’ve been told that we shouldn’t make time for silly, frivolous things. We’ve been told not to bother. We’ve been told that it’s a chore. We’ve been told that it’s not really worth our time. I’ve said before on this show that if you feel pulled to write, if you feel called to write, you have permission to write. If you need it to be official, I herefore, herefore, heretofore, hereby, maybe I’m looking for the word hereby, I hereby give you a permission slip that says you have permission to write.
Another big thing that we struggle with is even maybe after we feel like we have received and internalized the permission to write, to create, we struggle then with permission to call ourselves a writer. We feel like it’s not official enough. We feel like we don’t have the right experience or the right credentials. We feel like there hasn’t been an official decree that yes, insert your name here, is a writer, signed by the board of writers, whoever that may be. We feel like we can’t call ourselves writers because we haven’t been published, or we haven’t been published by the right people, or we haven’t been published in the right places, or we haven’t summoned up the courage to publish our work ourselves, whether in an ebook, in a blog, on a podcast. A lot of us struggle with the self worth that we need to call ourselves anything good, with the confidence, with the audacity.
When I was little, and okay, maybe even a little bit to this day, I worshiped writers. Writers were my heroes, because books were everything for me. Books were my escape, books were my friends, books were the worlds in which I was allowed to live fully. So the title of “writer”, those names that I saw published on the fronts of the books that I was reading, those people were wizards. They were magic. They were everything. I sort of got the idea in my head that authors and writers, which we won’t get into the difference about what those are today, because that’s a whole nother topic, but authors and writers were on a pedestal. They held some kind of secret that I was not privy to. They held some kind of insider knowledge that let them make books that I could pick up from the local library, and read and find friendship and love and escape within.
So I struggled for years. How dare I even put myself within their ranks? How dare I even think about calling myself a writer, when in my mind, a writer was somebody who changed lives, who provided safe havens for frightened and troubled children. Well, I want to do something right now. If you need it, and if it helps, I would like to give you permission to call yourself a writer, whether you’re published or not, whether you’re published in the places that you want to be or not, whether you feel like you’ve earned it, whatever that means, whether or not you’re able to write every single day, whether or not you’re in a writing season right now, like we talked about in the previous episode. This is your permission slip to call yourself a writer and to embrace what that title means for you.
There are no gatekeepers. Yes, there are gatekeepers in publishing. Yes, there are gatekeepers in TV and film production, and there may even be gatekeepers in your community or your local writers group, but there are no gatekeepers for what you are allowed to call yourself. There’s no gatekeeper of your identity. The only gatekeeper is you. And if you’ve given yourself the title of gatekeeper above the title of writer, then I would encourage you to think about switching the two. If you’re struggling with making it stick, write out, “I am a writer,” until you begin to feel it. Add it to your affirmations that you say every day in front of the mirror, or out loud in the shower, or on a walk. Print up business cards. Get the cheap kind, order 100 or 500 business cards that say your name here, comma, writer. You have permission to do this.
As I said, I’ve struggled with both of these types of permission, the permission to write, the permission to call myself a writer, and some other permissions, as well. And the one I really want to focus on today is a strange one, but a necessary one, and this is the permission to suck, the permission to be terrible, the permission to write garbage, permission not to be immediately great. These instances of having permission or not having permission are very interesting to me, and I think a lot of it goes back to the school system and what we learned there and how we learned there and how we shaped our identities. I went through a very, I don’t know if I want to say typical or normal, but I went through a public school experience, kindergarten through high school, and maybe your experience was like mine, and maybe it wasn’t, but regardless, you may still have struggled with this same thing. And that is, I never had permission to suck.
I never had permission to be terrible at anything. In school, you are praised if your work is good and you are punished or penalized if your work is not good, and this grading system follows us through our entire lives, through school, through college, or other training programs, if you go through those, to the workforce, to even volunteer positions and community work. When you’re in kindergarten, or first grade, or preschool, or wherever you are at the time, you are encouraged to color in the lines, to make pretty things, to be good. If you color outside of the lines, if you spell poorly, if your handwriting doesn’t look fantastic, if you are bad at math, you aren’t told, “Oh, well, that’s okay.” No, you’re given a poor grade, or you’re chastised, or you’re gently encouraged to do better next time.
And it becomes this performance. It becomes inauthentic, when we are expected to create or produce something, and have it be good and beautiful and brilliant on the first try. No one ever told me, “Sarah, it’s okay if you’re not good at this.” I always just experienced disappointment. “Come on. You can do better. Wow. I really expected more of you.” Maybe you’ve heard these things, too. Maybe you experienced love and grace and permission to be bad at things, but a lot of us didn’t. And so a lot of us struggle today when we’re not immediately good or perfect at something. We feel like we don’t have permission. We feel like we don’t have time. We feel like we don’t have space to mess up. We feel like we can’t mess up. Or if we do, we will face consequences with a capital C, a failing grade, a trip to the principal’s office, a difficult conversation with our boss or manager, a loss of income, a loss of a scholarship, because we’re not performing up to the expectations of the A plus grade.
But here’s the thing. Here’s the truth. We don’t start out immediately wonderful at anything. There are people who start out passively good at things. There are people who learn very quickly, but there is a process of becoming, there is a process of growing and thriving and succeeding. They don’t begin with perfection, or even greatness. They come over time, and we can’t get to that place without practice. We can’t get to that place without a period of becoming and growing and probably sucking at something. I know a lot of writers are frustrated when they sit down to write, and what they write, the material that they write, doesn’t match the picture, the feeling, the expectation that they had in their head. They don’t just sit down and dash off something perfect.
But that, I feel, is often the expectation that has been set for us. I need to get an A on the test. I need to win the race. I need to be a semi-finalist. Growth and success, and even greatness, don’t start off with us being perfect. They come from us writing through disappointment, through guilt and shame and frustration and despair. They come from us being terrible at something, sucking at something, and then forgiving ourselves for sucking and moving forward into our own. We need, I think, to be told that it’s okay not to be perfect immediately when you start out at something, and indeed, it’s questionable whether we can be perfect at all. We can be good. We can be great, even, but I think perfection will always elude us.
Malcolm Gladwell has very famously said that it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft. I’m not entirely sure that’s true. I haven’t done the math myself. But I feel like it’s a good and healthy perspective. It’s not 10 hours or 100 hours of writing. It’s 10,000 hours. And those first hours, those first 10 hours, those first 100 hours, even those first 1,000 or 5,000 hours, might not be any good. And that’s okay. That’s okay. It’s probably, again, frustrating and disappointing, but it’s okay. And you have permission to take that journey. You have a permission slip to be awful at something, and still enjoy it and still want to grow and improve in your craft. Because the paradox here is you need to give yourself permission to be terrible at something so that you can practice it, so that you can keep moving forward, so you can get better at it.
One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, says, “Perfection is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.” And I love this quote. I love the use of the word frozen because I feel like we often freeze. We freeze up. We can freeze in our tracks, if we don’t have permission to start off terrible. We sit there at our desk with our pen poised over our paper, and we’re terrified that any word we write will simply not be good enough. Any sentence we write will simply not be good enough. And I know this feeling. I’m experiencing it lately every day.
I’ve been working through season two of Girl in Space, and I have not given myself permission for it to suck, and paradoxically, to get better. I haven’t given myself permission to be messy. I haven’t given myself permission not to write a first draft that needs zero edits and zero polishing and zero structural changes. I went into this season two of this project pressuring myself to have this first draft come out perfect and fully formed and brilliant. But as I move forward with the project in its mean little frozen idealistic state, I’m realizing I need to be more gracious with myself. I need to give myself permission to suck and to let go of the rigidity that comes from having to make something perfect or great, or even good, on the very first try.
Author C.J. Cherryh says, “It is perfectly okay to write garbage, as long as you edit brilliantly.” And I think that we forget sometimes that editing exists and that second drafts and rewrites exist, and that it’s okay to write that, well, there’s a phrase about a first draft that’s terrible that uses a swear word. And I like to keep this show family friendly, so maybe you can imagine that. We’ll say crappy first draft. It’s allowed to be crappy, and it’s maybe better if it is, because that’s how you learn. That’s how you grow. That is the only way we move forward. It’s a paradox, and it’s a frustrating one, but you have to give yourself permission to be terrible at something so that you can grow, so that you can move forward, so that you can create something truly good. You have permission to suck. You have permission to write a crappy first draft. You have permission to write garbage. Did you know? Because I didn’t.
My husband and I have been reading Keep Going by Austin Kleon, which I think I’ve talked about before on this show. But a chapter we were reading a couple of weeks ago suggested that you make something terrible just for the fun of it. And so that is my encouragement to you this week, give yourself permission to make something really terrible, and terrible can mean whatever you want it to mean. Just allow yourself freedom and grace in your creating. Afterward, if you don’t want anyone to see it ever, you can crumple it up. You can even burn it. You can do what you need to do to make sure it never sees the light of day. Or if you don’t completely hate it, you can start the editing process. You can rewrite it. You can make a second draft. You can work with it and make it good.
The secret is, no writer is perfect. Even the writer whose name is on the front of your favorite book, that writer went through multiple drafts. That writer has a copy editor and a structural editor, and probably some other people in there, as well. Beta readers, writers group members, advisors, friends, family. There’s always one name on the front of a book, or two, if it’s co-written, but more than one person is responsible for the goodness within that book. And you’d better believe that that author was not born perfect. That author started off with permission to suck, permission to not be fantastic, permission to grow and to become, and to succeed and to thrive.
So I want to make sure that I extend to you today, if you’re willing to accept it, a permission slip, for the permission to suck, permission to go into your project and to not be frozen in fear or gripped by perfectionism, permission to make a mess, permission to explore how the words work together and how your characters interact with each other and how their motives shape their actions. You have permission to become. You have permission to grow. You have permission to thrive. And those can only come once you’ve given yourself permission to be awful, to forgive yourself for being awful, and to move forward into that growth and that becoming and that goodness.
The Write Now podcast is made possible by the beautiful and generous support of my patrons out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that allows donors to donate one dollar per episode, two dollars per episode, $200 billion per episode, whatever you feel is appropriate and feasible for you. If you would like to become a patron, you can go out to patreon.com. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/SarahRheaWerner, all one word. And that’s spelled S-A-R-A-H R-H-E-A W-E-R-N-E-R. And I would like to give special thanks today for patrons Amanda Dixon, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, TJ Bricke, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Ricardo Lugo, and Sara Lauzon. Thank you all so much for your kind and generous gifts. You help me pay for hosting costs. You help me pay for other costs associated with producing this podcast, including transcripts for everybody, to make sure that the show stays accessible. So thank you. Thank you so much for everything you do. I truly appreciate it.
Again, if you’d like to become a patron, you can go out to patreon.com, or you can visit my website, sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Navigate to the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 97, and click the link that says support this podcast. It’ll take you out to Patreon, and you can set things up there. If that’s something you feel moved to do today, I greatly appreciate it. If you don’t have the finances right now to support the podcast, that’s totally fine. Another way you can support the show is to just tell a friend about it. Word of mouth is the best way that this podcast gets spread. So yeah, if there’s a writer in your life, if there’s a creator in your life who you think could benefit from this show, let them know about the Write Now podcast. Send them a link, encourage them to subscribe, send them to my website, whatever works best for you.
Speaking of this podcast, the hundredth episode of the Write Now podcast is coming up, after only like five years, because I’ve been inconsistent in some parts. And I would love to know what would make for a meaningful and interesting hundredth episode for you. I’ve had listeners suggest I have people call in and I play clips of listeners on the show. I’ve had some people, well, one person in particular, say I should just talk about something I’ve always secretly wanted to talk about for like an hour. I was like, oh man, I don’t know if you want me to do that, but I can. So if you have any thoughts about what you’d like to see out of a hundredth episode, just let me know. I’d love to just see how I can help you, what you’d like to see, et cetera, all of that good stuff.
So you can hit me up on Twitter, Instagram. You can find me out at sarahwerner.com. There’s a little contact page where you can send me emails. I would just love to hear your thoughts. I would also love to hear your thoughts about today’s episode. I would love to know, do you feel like you have permission to write? Do you feel like you have permission to call yourself a writer? Do you feel like you have permission to suck at writing? And do you feel like that’s a good thing? I realize that not everyone might agree that this is a good idea, to give yourself permission to be terrible at something. So I would love to hear your thoughts.
Again, if you like, you can leave a comment out at the show notes for today’s episode, out at sarahwerner.com, episode 97, or if you want, you can just let me know your thoughts on Twitter, Instagram, other places on social media. I would love to see your thoughts and have a discussion. If you’d like to join a larger community of writers and creators, I invite you to join me on Wednesday and Friday nights at 7:00 PM central. I do a live stream create-a-long. So bring your work in progress, make a cup of tea or coffee, or bring something a little bit stronger, if you prefer. Bring some snacks, and join us. I go live in the Facebook group I am a Writer with Sarah Werner. So if you’re a member of that, you have access to these live streams for free. You can also join us. I am now out on twitch.tv/sarahrheawerner. So if you want, you can watch there for free, as well.
Again, they’re always free. They always will be free. Just come on out and join us. It’s a great community. We talk a little bit about writing. We dive into a 45 minute to one hour creative session, and then we come back for a discussion about how the experience was, what we struggled with, and we support and encourage and love one another. So please do feel free to join us. It’s family friendly. It’s open to all ages and all levels of creators. So whether or not you feel like you have permission yet to call yourself a writer, I invite you to join us.
And with that, this has been episode 97 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I have permission to write a really terrible first draft.
Dear Sarah, (Perry the engineer again) listening to you from the end of 2022… my 12yo daughter says “we need to go to Sioux Falls (from Australia), hunt Sarah down and give her a big hug (in a totally non-creepy way)…
Don’t be so hard on yourself.
In engineering, there is a thing called “second system syndrome” (look it up – its from a great software engineering book called “the mythical man month”) – and it says that second systems nearly always suck 🙁
The reason is that teams/developers are flushed with (over)confidence and burdened with expectations following a spectacular success. They then fall into this trap of having to make the second system “so much better” and “all the things the first system wasn’t” – and in so doing, make it loose all of the simplicity and brilliance that made the first system so successful.
I kind of dread what is ahead in the following WN podcasts, given that GIS2 isn’t due until 2023.
Optimistically, I am sure you have overcome this problem and have given youraelf some grace. We know that your second system won’t be even the tiniest bit sucky 🙂
It is interesting that (as a wise podcaster once said – or maybe it was the bible) “there is nothing new under the sun” and we humans all struggle with the same problems no matter where we are and what we are creating.
Sending hugs from Perry and Poppy
Perry and Poppy, hello! I’m so glad to hear from you again and would welcome a non-creepy hug. 🙂 Also… thank yo for these words. I hadn’t heard of “second system syndrome,” but that is EXACTLY what I am feeling. I am wrapping up writing season two of GIS and am EXACTLY noticing that it needs more of “the simplicity and brilliance that made the first system so successful.” So hopefully that’s something I can go back and put in… Anyway, thank you for listening and for your kind encouragement! Sending hugs from South Dakota! — Sarah