Hi Brenna! Lately I’ve been doing a lot of writing but one things that’s distressing to me is how much my skill does not line up with my passion and ambition. There are stories that are very important to me and I want to write them NOW but I’m afraid I’m not a good enough writer to do them right. I don’t want to wait until I’m good enough to do those stories but I also don’t want to “ruin” them. Did you ever struggle with that?

brennayovanoff:

Oh. OH man, this is one of those totally-normal/the-absolute-worst things. (Ira Glass actually has a really nice quote about it, which Zen Pencils then made into a really nice comic.)

I think that quote/comic is good advice on its own, but I would just like to add:

In my opinion, you should work on the stories you’re passionate about NOW, even though you might feel like you’re not ready to do them justice. In my experience, people will pretty much always push themselves harder for the things they care about, and that extra dose of investment can really help speed up the process, even if it can’t wave a magic wand and overnight it.

That said, you might still be disappointed with your early efforts, which means it’s really important to remember that you didn’t ruin ANYTHING. You tried to tell a story you care about, and if it doesn’t look right yet, so what? It’s not gone. You didn’t use it up. Even if it turns out well, even if you’re pretty satisfied and it looks pretty story-shaped and you wind up publishing that early attempt somewhere (not required, don’t worry if you don’t)—even IF that happens … if later you get to thinking “oh wow, I wasn’t ready, I could do so much better now” you still get to try again. 

I think we have this idea that as writers, the worst thing we can do is repeat ourselves. But actually, we return to our personal interests and obsessions all the time. Edgar Allan Poe wrote like a million stories about premature burial.  Artists sometimes have whole Blue Periods. I will pretty much never stop writing stories about moral ambiguity and what makes something a monster—that’s just what’s on my mind. Now, the particulars may change as you gain practice and experience, you might plot differently, or decide to play more and more deeply with character, or overhaul your descriptive style, whatever. That’s just artistic development. But you can ALWAYS come back to an idea.

It took me 7 years, start to finish, to write Places No One Knows. I wrote four other books during that time, and in between, I kept coming back to Places, and that’s fine. Right now, I’m working on a book that I’ve wanted to write forever and did not feel ready for—a lot of days I still don’t feel ready for it—but it’s never a slog and it’s never boring. I love it a lot. I might not do it right. I definitely won’t do it perfectly. But that’s fine. And I don’t mean that in the everything-is-on-fire way. I just mean it in the art-is-never-exactly-what-you-wanted-it-to-be-but-some-days-you-get-really-close way. And that? That feeling? That’s just pretty damn fine.