We want the first sentence to be perfect. If it’s not, then what’s the point? We tweak it and tweak it and tweak it until finally we look up and half an hour has passed by and we’re no closer to our goal than when we started.
If we’re lucky.
At this point, we may become so disheartened or annoyed with ourselves that we give up. Pack it in, we’re done.
Some may not even come back to it the next day. Another abandoned project.
It’s something I deal with constantly–writing something that doesn’t line up with what’s in my mind. Frustration. Annoyance. Anger. It’s a bitch, but you can’t let it beat you.
Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
-Neil Gaiman
The one thing that’s helped me is lowering expectations the first time around so I can finish a draft and fix the issues. Finish it now, fix it later.
It’s something that goes beyond writing and into any positive habit you want to create.
Set the bar low in the beginning. Raise it after you hit it consistently. It’s about the little wins, building consistent actions into lasting habits.
Take this blog post for example: There’s not much to it. It only took me a few minutes to write.
But that’s all I asked of myself. If I planned to write some killer first post, I’d waste hours and probably never write it. Instead, I chose something manageable, a small win. Get enough small wins and you’ll create a big win: a new, positive habit.
One bad sentence. That’s all it takes to get the gears spinning.
I’ll end it with the first few sentences of one of my favorite books about battling that inner demon that keeps us from writing or forming other positive habits: resistance.
There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
-Steven Pressfield, The War of Art