- Keep Calm and Write…and Don’t Look Back! -

We’ve reached the final page of this blog post (before the TL;DR)!

Writing has always been a challenge for me. Creative or not, it’s not one of my strongest suits, and it’s something I want to always improve on. Writing a word is easy, and the same goes for writing a sentence. But compiling everything you’ve written is difficult. It’s safe to say that writing is not an easy task, but when someone succeeds in writing a piece, whether it be a story or an essay, the accomplishment is worth celebrating.

But in order to write something that fits your standards, you will have to go through many rounds of revisions. And sometimes, you don’t get past the first round, and it is because you scrap everything.

And by “everything,” I mean everything.

Reading what I’ve written makes me want to do this….

I have the habit of looking back at my writing and hating every single word I’ve written, and this problem appeared before me when I started college. Middle school's curriculum and structure allowed me to put time towards revisions; high school, on the other hand, made me put more time towards creating the “perfect” and only draft. As soon as I started high school, the idea of writing rough drafts went out the window. School became harder as each year passed by, and along the way, I forced myself to write in a way that didn’t require me to do revisions. At the time, it was a good tactic because it allowed me to put more time towards studying and my extracurricular activities.*

But that did not last long. When I started college, one of my very first classes was a reading and composition class (this is not the same as the one mentioned earlier), and it required me to put in time and effort towards revisions. The “perfect” first draft was thrown out the window the moment I received my grade for the first draft of the first assignment. At that moment, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get by this class as how I had gotten by my writing-heavy classes in high school.

And this led to me building a frustration towards my writer self. Making my ideas come to life is hard, so you may be able to imagine how stressed out I was whenever I had to revise my drafts. I remember hating myself and my writing style whenever I reread my work and wanting to throw everything out the window. As the years went by, the frustration grew, and it finally manifested itself into a huge obstacle when I started writing fanfics.

I entered the world of fanfics around the summer of 2016 but did not start writing them until a year later. At that time, writing was easy and…not stressful. I had no worries about my writing and ideas, and because of that, I was able to write and post two stories (a chaptered story and a one-shot) within four months.

My first stories are not the best, but I’m proud of them. I would look back to remind myself of how far I’ve come.

But when it came to writing my third story, I started second-guessing myself. I was reminded of the stories here and how they were being written by talented people. It then led to me comparing myself to them. I began second-guessing my writing style and overthinking the possibility of readers not understanding what I was conveying. I started doubting my proficiency in the English language—writing, mainly—and it ultimately led to me developing a strong hate towards my writing.

And this was me for the next two years.

This was perhaps my biggest problem as a writer, and I’m not going to lie, NaNoWriMo forced me to confront it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to write anything if this problem continued to be there. Since the challenge was to write 50,000 words within thirty days, I had to force myself to adopt a new mindset.

And the mindset was this:

You’re not the best, and that is okay. You’re not perfect, so don’t let that stop you from trying your best. You will only get better if you continue practicing and learning, so write whatever comes to your mind—no matter how stupid and awful it is—and don’t look back.

This was hard, I have to admit, but that was what got me through NaNoWriMo. Whenever I write, I would go back, read, cringe, and erase my work. Because I did that so often, my word count would always be low. I knew I would get nothing done if I took the time to look back at what I had written and edited them. That tactic would get me nowhere.

So for this challenge, I told myself to write and to not go back and erase anything I’ve written, and to my surprise, I did this almost every single day. My progress grew at a good rate because I was not focusing on editing my drafts. Because I was more focused on writing than editing, I was able to meet my daily target, if not exceed it. I have to admit that there were times in which I came close to editing my work, but luckily, that did not go far.

Writing my NaNoWriMo story was hard, but at least I got some parts of it done. I can always edit it because the first draft of any story, chapter, scene, whatever piece of work is always the worst one. (This is the case for me; this does not apply to everyone, of course.) When I look back, I know I will cringe from reading my work, but hey, it’s better than hating what I’ve written and throwing everything away. I have a couple parts that are complete; all they need is a couple rounds of revision—or lots of it. I just have to keep doing what I’m doing if I want to see future me posting my latest work. I don’t know when that will happen, but hopefully it will happen soon.

I just got to remember to keep calm and write…and not look back!

*This did not apply for college applications. I revised my personal statements many times before creating the final drafts that would be sent to my schools.

Coming Up: TL;DR…And More?

P.S. It’s been a while since the last time I worked on this blog post. I created this page on Wednesday, January 1, 2020, and it has taken me three weeks to post it (this page was undrafted on Wednesday, January 22, 2020). I apologize if this page is or seems disorganized.