(Really!)
Okay, okay, maybe you hear me about giving yourself a break for your so-far-from perfect first draft (or second draft or third draft or twentieth draft) but you can’t seem to do it. You’re still too hard on yourself. You still think what you’ve written isn’t good enough. You’re trying, but you’re not yet successful in tamping down those perfectionist tendencies.
Fine. I get it (I really, really do).
You can’t get rid of that drive to do it right-perfectly-every-time-the-first-time.
So re-channel it.
Write something bad. I mean it. Make it your goal. Make it your mission to write the perfect worst prose ever. Think you can do that? Think you can go up against the best of the best, Perfectionist? Head over to https://www.bulwer-lytton.com to see how you measure up.
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrates the worst of the worst opening lines. It’s named in honor of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the writer who penned the infamous first line from his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
And when you realize that writing bad prose can actually be trickier than you think, maybe you’ll finally recognize that you’re actually not half-bad of a writer. In fact, maybe you’re pretty good. Not perfect, perhaps. But that’s okay. Because at least you’re not Edward Bulwer-Lytton.