When Okay Is Good Enough:

Why You Need to Write Badly

When I first started out writing this month’s newsletter, I began with the line, “It’s been a tough year for me, writing-wise and publication-wise,” but in writing the newsletter itself, I realized that was simply my perception of things. The reality was far from terrible.

Let me explain.

As I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter, I started this year writing poems with the Stafford Challenge (the challenge was to write a poem a day for a whole year). I wrote 158 poems, a poem a day for 158 days, and then one morning, I woke up and just…stopped. It was as if the well had completely run dry and I couldn’t think of any new things to write poems about. I felt like a failure because I didn’t complete the challenge (“finish what you start,” my parents always said), but then again, I wrote 158 poems, which is no small feat! I also learned a great deal about words and poetic language, some through studying the words and techniques of other poets; some through trial and error. Mostly error.

All of that helped a great deal when I enrolled in the Smokelong Quarterly Micro Challenge during the summer—in case you can’t tell, I love a good challenge! If you’re not familiar with this top online journal, I suggest checking them out (smokelong.com). They publish some of the most innovative flash prose out there. This challenge was to write a micro (a fiction or creative nonfiction piece) of 250-words or under every day for a month. And again, I wrote through the month, signed up for another month of prompts, and then stopped, just as I had with the poems. I felt like a quitter, especially because most of my pieces weren’t all that good and didn’t give me anything I wanted to revise, at least at that point. But I wrote a lot of words, took a lot of crazy writing risks, and learned so much about what worked for me and what didn’t.

Now we come to November, and while I didn’t try to do NaNoWriMo for a number of reasons, my graduate school’s Alumni Association has an event to encourage us to write more during this month: Spalding Write More, or SpaWriMo. They make encouraging posts every day, have several online Write-Ins a week, and just generally make it a time to reconnect to the page and to each other. I didn’t really plan to participate because November is generally a rough time for me, with all the papers I have to grade and the time change. But, I couldn’t resist trying something this year. I pulled out the unfinished novel I’d been working on since 2018 and started digging into it again.

I think I’d been afraid to finish it, that it wouldn’t be any good, that I didn’t have what it took to finish a project so huge. But then, I “suddenly” had a flash of inspiration for the ending (which is precisely what had been holding me back all these years), and I started writing on it again.

I wrote on it in a frenzy, getting up in the wee hours before school and neglecting everything I didn’t get paid to do (sorry to my husband) to work on this novel. In just thirteen days, I’d finished a draft. Of course, it needs a lot of refining, but revision is my favorite part of the writing process. I feel as if I can do this, now!

What’s my point? Simply that all the writing I did this year, which felt like a series of failures was anything but. It was really just me priming the pump of my creativity. If I hadn’t written bad poetry and a bunch of unsuccessful micros, I might not have gotten a solid draft of the novel finished.

In other words, if I’d let my desire for the perfect overwhelm my ability to do the okay, then I would have missed out on a great deal.

I should mention that this year wasn’t altogether unsuccessful in publishing, either. I sent out a lot of work, received a number of rejections, and just this November, have had three big publications: one of those micro memoirs I wrote appeared in Good River Review and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize ("Water"), a flash fiction piece I wrote was published in South Florida Poetry Journal ("To the Woman Talking to Her Therapist on Speaker at Waffle House"), and one of my short stories was published as a chapbook (available for preorder through Appalachia Book Company at Of Love and Water). I haven’t had a month like this in years!

The next time I feel like I’m writing badly, I’m going to celebrate the fact that my creativity is growing, I’m taking risks, and I’m learning. What could be better?

Let me know how you’re learning and growing, whether you’re writing right now or not. What’s your relationship with perfectionism? I love to hear if any of this resonates with you!