Scribbling

On Toppling the Need to Write a Perfect First Draft

I have loved to write since I was a little girl. But it had to be perfect.

There are good reasons we scribble before we learn to write our letters. Scribbling takes just a minute or two as our little hands wobble across a blank page. The looped and jagged lines go nowhere and everywhere. It does not matter if we keep the paper, give it away, or throw it away. It is done. This might be the prescience of what Allegra Huston and James Nave over at Imaginative Storm describe as letting your imagination lead the dance with your rational mind for awhile.

The method is a form of scribbling because we are turned loose with a list of group-generated words and encouraged to write. We can use those words or any others as prompts, but we have only 10 minutes to write. Ten minutes to convince our rational minds to let go and just see what imagination comes up with.

For we perfectionists, this is a worst case scenario. To begin, the 10 minutes does not work for us. That is not enough time to comb through the story looking at grammar, tense, flow, and whether the thing is any good.

And putting the imagination in full control is inadvisable, we think. We need structure. An outline. We need to plan. To choose words from the list that logically go together.

Reading the story out loud is over the top for us. We are called (but never forced) to read something we have not even read. We are revealing our raw imagination in real time to people we may be meeting for the first time. We feel naked.

But each time we step up and take ownership of our words, our rational mind trusts us just a little bit more. “Ho-ho! Not bad for 10 minutes,” they whisper. And sometimes even “that was fun.”

Huston and Nave also insist, like the scribbling, it is just fine to do “throwaway writing.” This concept goes against everything I was taught about life. We do not throw things away. They are handed down, repurposed, donated, or recycled, but only the rattiest, most worn-out, stinky things are thrown away.

And we must never write ratty, stinky things. By the time they hit the page they must be perfect. Somehow during the space and time transition between our brains and the page, we bat perfection every time. Or so was my expectation of myself.

Until much later in my life when I tried the Imaginative Storm process. I allowed myself to scribble on the page. To wander along curved and jagged lines. To go nowhere or everywhere.

Throwaway writing means giving ourselves permission to wander nowhere or everywhere.

We don’t have to know the destination when we set out. We can discover it along the way. With practice, we feel ourselves relax into this strange way of writing. “Writing what we DON’T know,” is the unusual name given to this by Huston and Nave. This means ignoring what IS in the scene you envision and imagining what IS NOT there. Looking at the negative space intently. What does it look like? What is happening? Who is there? What does it feel like?

Then write it down for 10 minutes. Read it. Delight yourself. Silence your perfectionist for a time. Fall in love again with writing.

This is a place for wandering.

Some of the topics I enjoy wandering through are writing and scribbling (what are we passionate about sharing with others?), travel (what places are bucket list musts?), lessons we wish we knew then, nature’s beauty, and life with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

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