Bad Drafts VS Schrödinger's Masterpiece

There's no point in my life that anyone was a worse critic of my writing than myself. Scattering my train of thought with negative self-thoughts because of an awkwardly worded passage on my first attempt at articulating an idea is one of my most self destructive behaviors. It works with such subtlety that I barely notice it happen and it never lingers long enough for me to really unpack why I do it. It gets to a point as I'm writing where I am discouraged from completing the piece I'm working. It ends up shoving the idea so far off the main-way that I get disconnected from it and move on before it had a chance to be good or bad. Afterwards I am left with regret about not having finished it. 

This is probably an overactive mutation of an evolutionary adaptation to deal with the overload of daily generated content being created to steal and hold my attention long enough to sell me some crap. These are ideas from people I don't know that don't need to find their way into my brain. This same instinct is self destructive to my creative guts when applied to my own idea creation. It is so ingrained into my mental hegemony at this point that I don't even know why it is being applied to my own creative endeavors. Self destruction through the lens of conserving energy for something better to come along. 

That internal criticism that keeps me from finishing, or going back to fix old work for that matter, feeds a Schrödinger's masterpiece approach to things I don't write or edit. If I never looked at them they could be whatever my addled brain remembered them being. It feels like a measure of control against the outer world's disinterest and dislike of my unwritten/unedited work. Hidden away from even myself to keep the idea as whatever my memory has decided that it was. 

The truth behind it all is as simple as a fear of writing a piece of shit. It is a conflict between my desire to create and my fear of creating something terrible. Dan Harmon explained that the way to overcome the “conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly” is to embrace the suck. "…we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck.” I don't think my fear is unique, but I also don't think that means I should live with it and all the self-deprecation that comes with it. The choice is clear though, either let myself be mentally beat down into a rut again, or confront the fear and resolve the fallout.

This means working hard to write something that sucks. A complete something that sucks can be fixed and made to suck less. I can tell when something is bad, over-actively so. I have to trust in my own good taste enough to make my ideas less bad. It is a low bar, but those are easy to trip over. Though in this case tripping over the bar into disaster is not even contrary to my purpose of trying.