Never Walked In High Heels

It’s 5 o’ clock at night and the same monster that has been facing me all day, is still staring at me from my desk. I’ve gotten up, gone to Starbucks, blown my nose half a dozen times, surfed the internet, and the monster is still there. Not roaring loud at all, just staring at me in that annoying way that only such a monster can accomplish. I am, once again, looking at a blank page on my computer screen.

Anne Lamott calls them “shitty first drafts” and says that they are absolutely vital to the writing process. Even as an adult, I am skeptical of this conclusion. I survived my entire high school and college education, and a masters degree, not doing first drafts of any paper. I would sit down, write, run it through grammatical checks and spell checks, maybe find a few errors in logic here or there, but on the whole the final draft would be done by the first time I wrote the paper. For earlier levels of education that would require you to attach former drafts as evidence of your own individual work,  I would then take the finished product and fabricate drafts behind it, switching paragraphs around, taking out thesis statements, and introductory sentences, making it look as if a seed germinated into a full-fledged paper.

Part of this is a combination of too smart for my own good, as well as extremely lazy to do anything properly. And the other half of my reasons in working in this manner is because of my disability. Being able to type an alarmingly slow rate meant I didn’t have time for third and fourth drafts. By the time I got the first draft done, it had to be turned in the next morning. And so I survived every level of education thus far, handing in first drafts of everything, which meant I never had the permission to write shitty first drafts.

When you’re working really creatively, you have to be able to do that. You have to give yourself the freedom to write loose-ends and dangling participles, unformed ideas that might not go anywhere and entire pages that will probably be thrown out. This is something that even without a deadline, I still cannot afford myself.

Did Tolstoy write shitty first drafts? Or Shakespeare? How about King David? Did he sit in his palace and say, “I know this is supposed to be divinely inspired, but it looks like crap to me.” All of a sudden I can’t help but wonder if this is what drove Hemmingway to the bottle, and Lewis Carroll to opiates. Overall, we don’t normally think of E. M. Forester having teenage acne and Oscar Wilde muttering obscenities when his pen ran out of ink. Did they allow themselves to make bad jokes that the rest of us have never seen? Did they wake up late and run out the door with mismatched socks to a meeting that they completely forgot about? Did Jane Austen ever have menstrual cramps?

I remember once I was sitting backstage at a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona. It was one of my first times backstage at a professional production, and I would look over to the other side of the wings to see actors goofing off right before they were supposed to go onstage. Behind the curtain it wasn’t serious. It was however, human, and miscalled cues, silly spoofs, and mislaid props were all just part and parcel of the experience. I pointed it out to an actress, saying, “It’s not all magical. In fact, being backstage is pretty mundane, as entertaining as it is.

“Yes, but doesn’t that humanity make the magic of the art all the more powerful?”

The beauty of any piece of work is not the success of that piece, however perfect it may seem to be. Rather it is the artist’s willingness to fail, however invisible it may seem in the final product, that makes the project so much more remarkable.

As a creative person, I haven’t been able to consistently master the ability to risk more and fail harder, as Beckett put it.  Maybe someday I will, and perhaps when I can consistently do that, I can see that a blank page is not a monster, but yet, an opportunity for so many possibilities.