Dare to Suck: Part 2

by Mary Sutton / @mary_sutton73

So, I dared to suck. I sent the story out. Yesterday, the comments from the editor came back. Guess what?

I don't suck.

I feel a CS Lewis quote coming on: Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay! Cue the fireworks!

She liked the character. She liked the dog. She didn't even talk about my lack of intricate plot twists (it is a short story after all; how many twists can you possibly have?). She even told me that I have "no reason to be insecure about my writing," which is a huge sigh of relief for me (okay, I know, lots have people have told me this, but this is a woman I've never met, a professional, who has no reason to sugar coat it for me).

Now, this is not to say that she didn't have any comments at all. Turns out that even though I didn't think I was writing a police procedural story (I deliberately stayed away from overly technical details that I thought characterized the genre), I was. Any story told from the POV of a law enforcement officer is a police procedural. Who knew?

Fortunately, I have great timing. I'm taking an online class with Lee Lofland, former law enforcement officer, author, and blogger at The Graveyard Shift this week. So I'm going to restrain myself from jumping right back into the story, finish the class, and hopefully be able to make it better.

That's the key: make it better. It's good now. It can be better. None of the editor's comments were unfixable. She didn't tell me, "Don't give up your day job, sweetie."

It's true. Great things happen when you show up. When you dare to suck. Because sometimes, you don't suck.

I suddenly feel the urge to "futterwhacken."

Don't Be Afraid to Suck

by Mary Sutton / @mary_sutton73

Confession time: Sometimes, I'm stupid. See, I don't always learn the lesson the first time. The universe has to tell me again, and again, and again, and...

You get the point.

The lesson of this week seems to be encapsulated in five words: Don't Be Afraid to Suck

I got a lot of links this week, this and this, from my friend Amy; this one; oh, and this one. I myself have written on the topic of fear over at my personal blog.

But as writers (well, as people really) all too often we feel like this:

Why? Well, I can only come up with one reason: We're afraid of sucking. We're afraid that every word from our fingertips will not be perfect, that we cannot capture the thought. So we remain paralyzed, afraid to move because we fear The Suck.

Most folks have heard of NaNoWriMo. This week, I heard of a new hashtag on Twitter, #1k1hr. The idea is to write 1,000 words in one hour. Some people scoff at this (see above link). Some people use the scoffing to cover their feelings. Because they fear The Suck. See, you cannot write a polished story, or even a polished scene in one hour. Just not possible. But you can write something. You can, to use the words in the blog post, "cut away everything that does not look like an elephant."

In one of my all time favorite books on writing Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, she refers to the "shitty first draft." It's an essential part of writing. You need that shitty first draft. You need to cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

That's what #1k1hr is. That's what NaNoWriMo is. It's the shitty first draft. Guess what, I read the 2,100 words I wrote yesterday and some of them sucked. But some of them were good. Some just needed a littler "ner" tweak to be really good (at least in my mind, which is the only mind that counts right now).

So writers, don't fear The Suck. Just write, write, and write some more. Yes, you'll end up with a shitty first (or second, or third) draft. Your elephant will look a little weird. Not every word that you put to pixels or paper will sound like Hemingway. But here's a secret: I bet Hemingway had a shitty first draft. I bet Hemingway occasionally feared The Suck.

But really, it's not so scary. And the good part, is if you don't fear the The Suck, someday, you might just feel like this: