The Three Words That Can Change a Writer’s Life
I used to be an insane writer.
I don’t mean that in terms of skill or output. No, I mean insane as in that quote about doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome.
I would rewrite the same scene three, four, or five times, sometimes changing just a single phrase from one rewrite to the next.
I would get a few thousand words into a new piece, lose faith, delete everything, and start it all over again.
I would obsess over word choice, my fingertips glued to the home row of my keyboard as I watched the cursor blink on and off, on and off, so afraid of picking the wrong word that I couldn’t pick any words at all.
The pressure I put on myself to write “perfectly” was off the charts. My approach was not only ineffective, it was actually unhealthy. And even though I knew that what I was doing was wrong, and even though my wife was able to point out that it was wrong (in a much kinder way than I did for myself), I couldn’t break free of these terrible mental habits.
Then three little words came along and changed my life as a writer.
I found them in a thread on Reddit — an AMA (Ask Me Anything) conversation with a person who was able to make a living via self-publishing their fiction on Amazon. One of the respondents asked how to deal with their crippling perfectionism (boy, did I relate to that), and the answer hit me like a metaphoric freight train:
“Tighten it down and send it out. Real artists ship.”
Real. Artists. Ship.
They put the words on the page, they get the piece out the door, and they move on to the next great thing.
Real. Artists. Ship.
I found myself thinking about some of the names on my bookshelf — Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Michael Crichton, and others — and what their writing actually looked like as opposed to what I had thought it looked like. Not every sentence they wrote was considered a thing of beauty — not even in their best works. And in fact, some of their prose is downright clunky — and occasionally, even offensive to the English language as a whole.
Real. Artists. Ship.
If my favorite authors didn’t write “perfectly” — why the hell should I?
Boom. Earth shattered, worldview changed. And the change was immediately applicable.
See, at the time, there was a particular story that had been in my head for years. I’d written and rewritten and rewritten the opening scene — and whenever I let my mind wander through the worlds I wanted to create, three out of four times I found myself thinking about this story.
And when I read those three fateful words — real artists ship — this story was the first thing that came to mind.
I attacked that story like a clockwork tiger. Every night, I put a thousand words on the page, not caring if they were the most beautiful words the language had ever seen — and in some cases, not even caring if they were grammatically correct, so long as the correct sentiment was there. And after three weeks, I had a rough little pile of words the size and shape of a horror novella, and that was more or less matched the vision that I had in my head.
After years — absolute years — the hard part was done. The story was there, on the page, in its entirety, ready to be edited.
Damn.
I’ve written a lot since then. Some of my writing has earned me money — and some of it has earned me praise from thousands of strangers. The novella I finished all those years ago didn’t give me either of those things (although, in the words of my very honest wife, it was “the first thing I wrote that really made it seem that I could have some sort of future in writing” — and I agree with her).
But finishing that novella is still the most important thing I’ve ever done as a writer. It showed me what it really means to write — to sit down, day after day, and push through self-doubt in order to put words on the page. It showed me how to break the cycle of insanity — to stop looping back on myself through endless partial rewrites — and to actually finish something. And it showed me how to find closure — how to put to rest the stories that sat with me for years rather than continuing to let them ride on the record loop of an unhealthy mind.
Real artists ship. Those three little words changed my writing life — and without them, I think I would have given up on all of this a long time ago.
