"My Baby Is Ugly"

Every time I finish a draft of a short story or, like last month, a novel, I hear a voice in my mind telling me, “Oh, God. My baby is so damn ugly.”

I first heard that in one of Brandon Sanderson’s writing lessons on YouTube.

You have this baby that you’ve cherished. And you might have cherished this baby since you were a teenager, meaning “I’m going to write this book someday.” […] And you might run into the situation upon writing it that suddenly your baby is ugly. […] And it’s even worse than the baby being ugly. You know the baby […] was perfect in your mind. […] And then you made it ugly through your fat fingers being unable to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

I always think back to this passage because my babies are monstrous: dialogue is stiff, descriptions are absent, some scenes are rushed, and there are plot holes larger than my apartment. I stare at the finished draft and I want to cry. I feel overwhelmed at the thought of all the work it will take to make that thing into something passable.

I am also a perfectionist. I hate the feeling of not nailing something perfectly on the first try. Writing has been a very humbling experience. You spend months crafting worlds, sketching ideas, putting one word after the other with care, only to end up with something that makes you feel bad and that you want to burn on a funeral pyre.

Everybody’s creative process is different but, for me, writing a first draft is easy. Revising is the hard part. It is hard because it is more “engineering” work, but most importantly, it is hard because it requires me to face the gap between the perfect ideal in my head and the imperfect reality.

Nevertheless, if you are like me, let me tell you one thing: yes, my baby is ugly, but I can make it better. I can become better. The work is hard, but it is worth it. I take my time, I go slowly and methodically and, in the end, my baby is no longer ugly (not as much, anyway).

Sanderson himself gives you a suggestion for pushing through that feeling:

You need to push through that and keep writing. You need to learn early on that the product of your writing time is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you.

I cannot agree more.

And now, let’s go back to revising.