I gave my answer: “My name is Savannah and I’m taking this class because I have a complicated relationship with fiction writing.”
My professor laughed. “So you’re taking this class as a punishment for yourself.”
That is correct.
I love writing. But I also hate it. I believe if you ask any writer, they will say something similar. In a conversation with a creative writing graduate student a week ago, she highlighted the true binary in writing: it is work and it is play. But mostly work.
As a result of my creative writing class and involvement with BYU’s literary magazine Inscape, I’m forced to confront how I feel about writing. Do I really like it? Do I have potential to grow? Do I have the patience to grow? My saving grace in answering these questions was found in a book (as answers often are).
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Perfectionism is the true villain.
In her (entire!) chapter about the evils of perfectionism, Anne Lamott makes a very striking point. “Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force.” The matter of whether we want to write or not is irrelevant if we let perfectionism win.
The fact that I am a perfectionist in writing was made strikingly clear to me. After every paragraph, I rewrite like crazy, sometimes spending a half hour on a paragraph I’m going to delete later. Where is the logic in that? Maybe the reason for my complicated relationship with fiction writing is my perfectionism. It halts my exploration, expression, and growth as a writer.
So DOWN with perfectionism! The growth of myself as a fiction writer is much more important.