When you do anything challenging for the first time, it often starts so poorly, mediocrity is a step up.
You’ve lived through a powerful experience and made it out the other side. Whether it was triumphant or tragic, heroic or depressing, it’s over now, but you can remember in minute detail each nuance, color, scent and texture of that time and place. You want to tell your story, no, you need to tell your story so you can feel lighter and you might even inspire others who find themselves in the same kind of situation.
So why don't you sit down and write? There are a slew of reasons why we don't just get on with it. When I consulted with some of my fellow writers and students, I learned that at the core of most people’s list of reasons to avoid the blank page is fear of mediocrity.
In the 1800s, classical composer Antonio Salieri was so jealous of his crony, Mozart’s genius, and so critical of his own work, he pronounced himself “the patron saint of mediocrity.” He couldn't think of anything worse to be, he couldn’t stop comparing himself, and he unsuccessfully chased greatness all of his life.
Author Tom Robbins describes his relationship to mediocrity in his novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas:
But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. It’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.
I’ve been a fan of Tom Robbins ever since I read his early book, Another Roadside Attraction. I love his turns of phrase like the quote above and his outrageous plots and simpatico characters. But I don't necessarily agree with his sentiment about mediocrity because when you demonize anything, it gains power and becomes fair game for avoidance. My thoughts about this may be unpopular among writers since mediocrity is so reviled, but you have to start somewhere. If you’re intimidated out of the gate by the idea of not being perfect, you won’t be going anywhere.
However long you’ve been writing, your initial attempt will not be all that good. It will be far from perfect. You can count on that. It might even be awful. But you can't get what’s in your head onto the page without a few false starts. Surrealist painter Salvador Dali said, “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
You just have to do it. Any masterpiece begins with a single paint stroke, a musical note, a dance step or a word. When you're writing Chapter One, it’s like
standing at the edge of a high diving board, toes over the end, getting up the courage to make the leap. What if you jump and bang your head on the diving board or end up in an embarrassing and painful belly flop? The risk feels great but a few aches, pains, and belly flops are inevitable. If you can swallow your ego and allow yourself to suck at what you’re doing, you can only get better.
I used to work out at an elite gymnastics studio where girls from ages 5 to 18, Olympic hopefuls, showed up every day to practice. When a little girl begins to train, she starts on a balance beam that’s less than a foot off the ground. She tries to walk as she takes the necessary steps to learn the technique so she can eventually perform on a beam that stands the requisite four feet from the ground. As she moves across the four- inch-wide surface, one bare foot in front of the other, her toes clinging on the beam as she jumps and twists, you can bet she’s going to fall. You should see what they go through, how often their hands slip off the uneven bars, they hit their heads, they fracture bones, get shamed by their coaches, cry in frustration, sprain their ankles and strain their muscles. But little by little, step by step, they get good enough to perform the death-defying feats that place them in the category of Superhero.
Just like any athletic endeavor, good writing doesn't happen suddenly or all at once. It’s a day-to-day practice and when you begin, your work usually comes out jumbled, too sparse, too personal or not personal enough. It’s up to you to keep making it better because writing is a process, not a one-time event. Your work needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It needs to have peaks and valleys with tension and release. If it doesn't, it’s not a book or a story, it’s an excerpt.
Once you become immersed and get something on the blank page, you get to improve the wording, remove extraneous adverbs, change adjectives, delete exclamation points, organize chapters, create a rise and fall in the action or the lessons, and do your best to be authentic. This will take time, something we revile in this age of attention deficiency. Our society has long been one of instant gratification. We get little encouragement to build something slowly, from the bottom up, but that’s what it takes to write a book.
I have a friend in her sixties who is smart and healthy. She’s in great shape physically, her mind is keen and her instincts are sharp, but as she gets older, she gets less experimental and more rigid. “Why don't you learn to play the guitar?” I asked her once when she was complaining that her life was boring. “You love guitar music and you told me you wish you’d learned to play an instrument when you were young. Why don't you start now? It’s never too late.”
“I can’t tolerate being bad at anything at this stage in my life,” she explained.
It doesn’t matter if you’re thirty-six or sixty-six or eighty-six. If you think you’re too old to learn something new, then you’re right. You are too old. It's all in the way you think about it. What’s the big deal about starting at the beginning and moving forward from there? You can’t expect to pick up a guitar for the first time and play like Eric Clapton. You don't go to your first ballet class and perform a pirouette like Misty Copeland. You don’t create suspense like Stephen King when you write your first horror story. You don't build your characters as expertly as Anne Tyler does. Not yet. The ladder to excellence is tall and you have to climb up rung by rung. You try, make mistakes, delete, drop back to Square One, and try again in order to eventually and painstakingly rise above mediocrity.
Excellent synopsis of the creative process! I have written my share of good pieces, and of clunkers. They all get read, at least by the faithful few-who don't hesitate to let me know when I've nailed it, as well as when the ball's been dropped. Life, and my daily blogging, go on.