Writing, Play, and Finding Genius

It’s a nice vision — the writer, sitting confidently in front of their laptop or notebook in some hole-in-the-wall coffee shop or home office, sips a sippy-sip beverage and, eyes closed, listens to their muse.

Their fingers clackity-clack away or move their pen at a ridiculously impressive speed, their opus manifesting with the progressing ticks of the clock. Later, they share the opus to unprecedented accolades.

Let’s wake up.

Although I’ve occasionally had the kinds of writing sessions described above, many times, they’re far from this ideal. I don’t get stuck in writer’s block, yet the writing is not exactly going to win prizes.

Not bad. Not good. Just lackluster.

It looks a lot like this:

Inside the murky mush

In the clip above, we see Alan Tudyk playing pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne in the TV series Firefly. Wash has no idea where he’s going with his play. He can’t even think of a name for the land his dinosaurs have discovered. Yet, he’s not stuck. He’s still able to move the dialogue along and get something.

We don’t like to talk about this murky mush as writers, where the only label that’s appropriate for what we’re doing is mediocrity. We’re already struggling with fragile enough egos as it is — to admit that we’ve produced at a less-than-optimum quality hurts.

Yet, what if, in not acknowledging the slew of mediocrity, we misrepresent writing and set poor expectations for it?

Getting comfortable with the whole bell curve

Creativity requires a willingness to fail, but it also requires us to do a lot of what sits between failure and success. Without acknowledging the entirety of the bell curve and being okay with sitting in the middle a lot, we misrepresent what the process of writing really feels like, how long it takes, and the effort it requires.

The hard reality is that most of writing is playing with your dinosaurs, hoping you get some glimmer of genius. Most of writing is mediocrity, connected by gaps of unknowns and hope. That’s why not every writer wins — not everybody has the endurance to wade through that much play and messiness to find a path of brilliance.

But endurance is something that can be built up, and part of that work is gaining absolute clarity about what is required and what we’re signing up for. If we as writers understand just how much of our work will sit below par, we can stop putting so much unrealistic pressure on ourselves so that showing up every day is more bearable.