Woman Ironing, 1887, Edgar Degas, National Gallery of Art. Definitely not me.

Let me be clear. This painting is not me. I am the woman who does laundry and then promptly forgets about the laundry in the dryer or laundry basket. Can you relate?? I know rare souls who love ironing. My 91-year-old-mother-in-law, and also a dear friend who is decades away from that age, look forward to laundry day. They share the love of ironing out creases, getting into the nooks and crannies of a shirt; using starch and steam to transform a wrinkled mess into something worthy. What I find so interesting is how well ironing relates to writing. As a book coach and editor, you’d think I’d care more about imperfections. Well, I do, BUT there’s a time and place for it. I’m here to stop you from ironing out the early wrinkles in your writing. Because it blocks your writing, ideas, and flow in a nasty stiff-collared way!

One of the common mistakes new writers make is to belabor their work during the writing process. You- know-of-that-of-which-I-speak. Have you ever caught yourself rereading your own work several times over? You desperately seek the best word, the perfect metaphor, the sentence to stop a reader in their tracks? And you’ve only written one page?

See? I have ESP. I knew it.

Wrinkles Have A Job

Sorry to shake the starch out of you, but wrinkles have a job. Yes – even in writing, especially in writing.

I’ve always loved this quote,

“All first drafts are shit.”

– Ernest Hemingway

The wrinkly bits in your writing are little roads to better writing. And once you accept that, you’ll stop driving yourself nuts, and causing yourself anxiety about your “bad writing”.

Listen. All writing is bad at first. It just rises to its own level. No matter how experienced a writer may be – everyone needs to go back and edit once the project is well underway. Hemingway did. Toni Morrison did. Anne Lamott does. All the heavy weights in the writing world eventually have to rewrite. And rewrite again. And possibly many more times before they’ve nailed it.

But they didn’t do it at the beginning.

Why? Because you lose your way, that’s why.

You start to doubt yourself. Or you start to fall in love with your writing because you’ve read it so many times. You lose your sense of direction. And you waste precious time ironing out the wrinkles when you should be letting the wrinkles help guide the way.

Just because a word, sentence, paragraph, page, or chapter feels awkward and rough? Doesn’t mean you need to tackle it now. Press on! (LOL. Not with your iron. But with fortitude. Keep writing.)

There’s sh*t in mistakes. But there’s also magic. Trial and error has beauty in it. It’s messy but it is supposed to be messy! There’s something there that wants to be said. And later, much later, during the editing process – you’ll see the messy little word/sentence/paragraph/chapter is what sparked the idea for something else. I teach this in Scribbly. I call it the Domino Effect.

Now It’s Your Turn!

Write something today and don’t fix a thing. Initially, it’s tougher than it looks.

But you can do it. And we’ll save the ironing process for another day!

As for me? Well, I have to run the dryer again for clothes I left for a few days (Cough! Week.)

*Did you love this? Then check out Scribbly – my quirky and gentle writing program that we snail-mail right to your home. Each issue has a theme, so all you have to do is follow the path! We make writing easy and fun for you. We’re nice like that.