Following my reading of the “Shitty First Drafts” excerpt, I felt inspired, inspired to write my own shitty first drafts without the long hours of frustration and self hate that come with writing such a draft. These feelings stem from my perfectionism, I am an irrational perfectionist. I like my writings to be perfect. I like the words to flow beautifully and my purpose to be abundantly clear. This, for me, is an extremely difficult task because I don’t let myself write a “shitty first draft”.
The very thought of someone seeing anything I’ve written before it has met my own standards initiates a spiral into what one may call; the fiery pit of hell and despair that is writer’s block. Once one has entered this fiery pit, it is nearly impossible to claw one’s way out. This is especially true in my case. I am convinced that I get writer’s block like no other. It is highly likely that anything I am assigned to write, I will spend hours staring at the screen, repeatedly typing and deleting different variations of the same imperfect sentence, waiting for the moment that inspiration strikes and words flow beautifully from my fingertips.
However, this is not the case tonight. I am feeling particularly inspired with this blog post to ignore my self doubt, simply go with the flow and see how it turns out. “…all I had to do was write a really shitty first draft…”. With this in mind, I have written something I actually feel is up to par, something that I wouldn’t be ashamed to let others read. And I must say, it was a much more pleasant experience than I usually have when writing. I do believe that I will continue this mindset of having to first write something “terrible” to create something worth reading and showing to others; something beautiful.
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