Shitty and Good Enough

I thought I would get to Entangled Life in this one; I did not

I spent most of today writing what I realized is the first hard thing I’ve tried to write since my book. (Hopefully you’ll be able to read it in a month or two, but I’m not counting my chickens before they’ve hatched into a serviceable draft.) It forced me to really put my money where my mouth is with all the process advice I give students, especially in writing a shitty first draft. After the last writing workshop I gave, which focused on all the ways you can work writing into your process beyond drafting, I started to think that maybe shitty first drafts are just for if you don’t do a lot of pre-draft writing, like maybe a shitty first draft is a pre-draft, if we’re honest. Usually when I sit down to write a shitty first draft, that assignment is just a way of tricking myself into getting started. By the end, the draft is usually just fine, but I had to tell myself it could be shitty so I could write it. Today’s draft? Not so. Today’s draft is bad, it’s a mess, I could feel it as I was writing—and I am not prone to thinking my work is bad as I write. I usually enjoy writing (honestly that’s why I’m writing this newsletter now, I had to sit down and write something enjoyable to remind myself that I could), even when I know there’s a lot of revision work ahead of me. I like the flow and discovery of drafting, the problem-solving of revision, the polishing of editing. And I even checked in with myself while I was writing this seriously challenging, definitely bad draft. Did I want to cry because it was so hard? Yes. Was I unhappy to be writing? No, I still loved it. There wasn’t any pleasure, but it was good.

That’s honestly the big quibble I take with Anne Lamott’s description of shitty first drafts, in the bit of Bird by Bird (that link opens a pdf) where she coined the term: She writes about them as suffering. She writes about how miserable it is to write a shitty first draft. I can’t tell anyone how to feel, but a shitty first draft isn’t necessarily painful. It can be freeing, actually. Stripped of stakes and evaluation all that’s left in writing is discovery, of your ideas or of the lovely next word in your sentence. Setting yourself the goal of writing a shitty first draft is about making things easier. And when writing feels easy, it feels good.

But sometimes, even the shitty first draft is not easy. Today’s drafting wasn’t hard because I hadn’t adequately prepared. (Was it hard because I overprepared? Maybe, now that I think of it.) I definitely overreported, in terms of number of interviews, though I didn’t end up with much more material than I needed. I processed the interview transcripts, whittling them down to gems through two passes of highlighting, organizing the highlights by topic for easy finding. I sketched out each source’s key ideas, and wrote those on index cards which I could then organize by theme. I did some freewriting. I sketched out an outline, or more like a prose skeleton, because I needed sentences and transitions to pin down the relationships between these ideas. I reread the pitch I sent last fall, back when this idea seemed streamlined and self-evident. And then I sat down to write today, and ended up with as many words as should be in the final draft. A good last line, a bad first one, and lots of indeterminately bad writing and thinking in between.

Is the problem that this story wants to be 8,000 words long and I’ve been allocated “a bit more than 2k”? Also quite possible. And not anything that’s going to be resolved in my favor!

Tomorrow I teach, then Wednesday I come back and see what I have. I might print it out to annotate it. I’ll probably make a reverse outline to see what each paragraph says and does, how I might rearrange things, what I should add and what I don’t need. At that point I really hope things click into place, because we have deadlines to deal with here, plus the fear of being seen as A Flake.

But there’s a corollary to the shitty first draft, at least in my thinking: Good Enough. Caps because it’s something of a term of art, borrowed from Winnicott’s idea of the Good Enough Mother, one of my personal lodestars. I’ve written about extending the idea of the Good Enough Mother to the Good Enough Writer, and I’m realizing, right here as I type this (see this is the beauty of how low-stakes writing opens us up to discoveries!) that my book is a Good Enough Book. Not because I’m not enormously proud of it—I am!—but because, within the constraints of deadlines and the foolishly broad subject matter I decided to write about all in one book, I had to accept that it would never be perfect, just Good Enough. I could never do truly comprehensive research for every chapter in the book, but my research would be Good Enough. I might not find a perfect example, but I could work with a Good Enough one. Even the structure, or the book’s conceit? Good Enough. By the time I really got into the swing of things, I had 6-8 weeks to research and write each chapter. Nothing perfect was happening in that time, nothing even optimal. But the point of Good Enough is that “perfect” is a dangerous lie. And so my book was Good Enough, and now I love it all, just like a Good Enough Mother is not a compromise or a shortcoming, but an actual ideal, a healthy balance and a wonderful parent both to be and to have.

So next time I sit down with this draft, I hope that I can find my way to Good Enough. Not the perfect version of this story, which doesn’t exist so why bother beating myself up for falling short, but a Good Enough one that makes some sense, offers some delight, and puts a little bit of new thinking into the world.

I will honestly probably keep the “bad” first line, because it amuses me, and that matters, too.