There’s nothing writers hate more than writing. If you ever need to deep clean your house, just give yourself a writing goal, and your baseboards will be dust-free before you can say “deadline.”

This is why so many people say that a bad first draft is better than an empty page. It’s easier to edit than to churn out the story from scratch. But if you’re too hard on yourself for your messy first draft, then the editing stage provides its own kind of misery. After going through all the effort of planning your draft, crafting your characters, and building the world they live in, instead of feeling relieved that you got past the worst stage, you’re filled with despair that after all of that effort, your story seems trite, your prose seems purple, and your characters seem dull. 

Just like you might come to associate the scent of gasoline with road trip vacations from childhood, you might eventually start to associate sitting in front of a blank page with the inevitable feeling of despising your own art. 

Reality Check

If you’re looking at your own rough draft and hating it so much that you can’t bear to write at all, it’s likely that you’re comparing it to your favorite writers. But unless you’re also friends with those writers, and you’re privy to their first drafts, you have to remember that you’ve only ever read a finished book. Not an edited first draft, but a draft that has been edited so many times and by so many professionals that it likely bears little to no resemblance of what first hit the page. 

Take a moment to pick up whatever book that’s hovering in your mind when you look at your own early efforts at a new story. Look at how well-produced it is, with all the design work that went into the cover and all of the blurbs printed on the front and back, and consider how much planning it took to make everything that covers the words inside. When you open that book, instead of flipping through the pages that are making you so miserable about your own work, flip to the back and look at the acknowledgments. The editors, the agents, the friends, the time spent—it’s all there! If that’s not enough, look up the manuscript pages of famous authors from the past; they’re marked up and scratched out so much you can barely see the original text. 

No one’s first attempts at sketching out a story deserve to be compared to a final product.

When You Know Too Much

Even when you are able to accept that it’s unfair to compare first drafts to finished bestsellers, it can still be hard to judge your own plotting when you already know all the spoilers. For example, if you’re writing a murder mystery, and you’re trying to write the scene where the detective examines the crime scene for the first time, it might strike you as painfully obvious that the butler did it. When you’re writing a romance, it might feel forced that these two characters are attracted to each other. Your coming-of-age story might feel, to you, like your character hasn’t learned anything at all by the end. 

It’s important to remember that your experience reading your own book is fundamentally different from that of your potential readers. If those sorts of concerns are preventing you from working on your draft, try to set them aside and save them for when you send that early draft to a beta reader. 

When You’re Trying Too Hard

The work of writing, the actual creation of art, happens when you’re sitting at your desk, fighting to get the words on the page. That’s what people who think they can use an AI chatbot to “help” them write don’t understand—the hard work is the work! 

But that’s not the only part of the creative process, and there’s a difference between working hard and the work being too hard. Sometimes, if your perfectionism is ruining your writing time, it’s a sign that you need to go back to the prep work. If the characters in your historical novel are reading to you like they might pull an iPhone out of their trouser pocket at any moment, then you might need to do more research about that time period so you feel confident describing the inner life of someone living in that world. If you can’t get your characters to have a conversation that doesn’t go around and around in circles, then maybe you need to step back and return to the basic question: What does my protagonist want?

Be Curious

It’s pretty much impossible to do the immense work of writing a poem, a short story, or a novel and not care about the results. That’s why perfectionism is such a persistent issue for writers; you want your work to be great, otherwise, you’d be doing something else with your precious time! 

If that depth of caring is getting in the way of actually doing the work you want to do, try to redirect that energy toward curiosity. Instead of feeling despair that you’re only filling the page with garbage you’ll have to delete later, think of it as an experiment. If you go through with this current idea, what will that look like? If you don’t end up liking it, what direction will that lead you? 

Creating art is about translating something from your heart into something that can be experienced by others, but it’s also about your own journey of discovery. If you wrote down the perfect words right from the beginning, you’d miss out on all of the surprises that come from trying something, seeing that it’s not quite right and changing it into something better. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.