When I told myself at the beginning of the year that my main goal for 2010 was to write a novel, I honestly didn’t have much faith in myself. My history with writing has been in no small way melodramatic. In the past I would demand perfection of my work before I could even really wrap my head around it: I would expect the first draft to be the final draft. There was even a day when I openly acknowledged this:

I guess part of it is my approach to writing, which is probably a terrible approach regardless, and that is to do everything right the first time—or at least as close to right as you can get. The idea of letting a less than perfect sentence live disturbs me. Consequently, this is probably why I never write.

At least I admitted then how stupid it was.

Because of this I rarely finished a draft of anything, and the drafts I did finish could never really develop into the fully realized stories they deserved to be due to my complete inability to change anything. For a long time I thought I was writing great stories and formulating life-changing novels, but the reality was that everything was unbearably mediocre. It helps to view things now through the lens of an editor: if today I received an old story of mine as a submission, would I publish it? I’d like to think I wouldn’t make that mistake.

Me, two years ago, trying way too hard to write the perfect sentence.

Yes, at the beginning of the year my outlook was bleak. I was outwardly hopeful but somewhere in the depths of my heart was the doubt, the voice that reminded me of all the other novels I’d started—those I first wrote obsessively but of which quickly tired. My heart told me that Rebellious Bird would go the way of Carousel, of Where Bluebirds Fly, of Moths and Butterflies, of a multitude of others never even graced by trite titles. Essentially, this lack of faith stemmed entirely from one simple emotion: fear. I was afraid that what I would write would not be perfect.

I’m not sure what has happened to me in the last year, but the idea of pretending something is complete when you’ve only just written the first draft is mortifying. Once I realized that there would be a long and involved revision process in writing this novel, the fear instilled within me almost entirely dissipated. I started writing, and since January 9th I’ve been at it almost every day. I have a document on my computer with over 85,000 words to prove this.

Of course I edit as I go. I write a sentence that just doesn’t sound right. I strike it and write it again. A paragraph leads me in the wrong direction. I go back and restart it. Those things make me tread carefully but at the same time I tell myself that perfection isn’t necessary, not in this draft, because that’s all it really is—a draft. I’m expecting to finish the last chapter before April rolls over into May, and that leaves me with eight more months of 2010 to mutilate, to mend, to mold this manuscript into whatever sculpture pleases me. I’ve also pledged to myself that I will let a month pass between writing the last sentence and even so much as reading the first paragraph. There’s a certain wisdom, I’ve seen, in letting yourself be surprised by the things you’ve written, and only time can bring that.

Sure it’s a lesson that writers should learn before they even start writing. Sure I learned a little late. But I’ve learned it, and if there’s anyone out there who finds that writing has become unbearable, who finds that the first paragraph to his or her great novel is abysmal, perhaps that person could learn it, too. Only a year and a half ago I was begging myself to give up writing forever. I was telling myself that I couldn’t take the disappointment and disillusionment anymore. That has changed. Even if that first paragraph turns your stomach, just finish the novel as you have it in your head. There’s nothing to prevent you from taking the rickety bones of its skeleton and soldering to them the flesh that will make it the best thing you’ve ever written—something of which you can truly be proud.