Excerpt from my Book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting: Embracing Mediocrity Step by Step

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

                                    - - -  Henry Ward Beecher

You’ve lived through a powerful experience and made it out the other side. You want to tell your story, no, you need to tell your story so you can feel lighter and hopefully 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 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, 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.

Celebrated 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 and his outrageous plots and simpatico characters. But I don't 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 most likely will not be all that good. It will be far from perfect. You can count on that. It might even be awful. But your job is to try to get what’s in your head onto the page. For me, I usually have a few false starts. Often, when I write my weekly blog, I choose a topic, start writing, hit a roadblock. delete and go back to Square One. I choose another topic and repeat. No matter how frustrated I become I don’t throw up my hands and walk away. I try again and when I hit on the right subject, my hands start flying across the keyboard. What write is mediocre, but that’s what editing is for.

Surrealist painter Salvador Dali said, Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.  

You just have to start. Any masterpiece begins with a single paint stroke, a musical note, a dance step or a word. It’s like standing at the edge of a high diving board, toes over the edge and getting up the courage to make the leap. You might bang your head on the diving board or do an embarrassing and painful belly flop. The risk feels great but a few aches, pains, and big splashes are inevitable. If you can swallow your ego and allow yourself to suck at what you’re doing and start over, you can only get better.

I used to work out at a gymnastics studio where Olympic hopeful from 5 to 18, showed up every day to practice. A little girl starts on a balance beam that’s less than a foot off the ground. She tries to walk forward until she can eventually tackle a beam that stands four feet from the ground. She puts one foot in front of the other on  the four inch wide surface, jumping and twisting and you can bet she’s going to fall. When their hands slip off the uneven bars, they fracture bones, get shamed by their coaches, cry, sprain their ankles and pull muscles. But 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 immediately. When you begin, your work usually comes out jumbled, 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. These are the things to work on.

Once you get something on the blank page that seems right, you improve the wording, remove extraneous adverbs and adjectives, delete exclamation points, organize chapters, create a rise and fall in the action and do your best to be authentic. This takes time, something we can hardly tolerate in this age of attention deficiency. Our society has long been one of instant gratification and 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. Her mind is keen and her instincts are sharp, but as she gets older, she gets 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 younger. Why don't you start now?”

“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. You can’t expect to pick up a guitar for the first time and play like Eric Clapton. You don't get your first pair of pointe shoes and perform like Misty Copeland. In the same way, 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 begin, make mistakes, delete, drop back to Square One, and start all over again in order to eventually rise above mediocrity.

Remember: When you do anything for the first time, if often starts so poorly, mediocrity is a step up.