Learning to Let Go
By Jina Jeon
“When I let myself write badly, I began to write more, and as I wrote more, I wrote better”
I used to think everyone knew what they were doing. As a kid, I marveled at my parents as they typed lines of code that looked completely random to me. When my teachers presented their lessons, I thought they were geniuses who knew everything from the day they were born.
As I grew older, I realized that was far from the truth. In the way an audience can’t tell when a performer botches their lines, the professionalism we perceive in others is often overblown by our comparatively little experience.
My mindset around writing changed when I came to this realization. Until recently, I glorified famous authors and other young writers, wondering why I couldn’t write the way they did. I read copiously and wrote every day, and yet my output was nowhere near as eloquent as theirs. They seemed to know precisely when to place which word to maximize its impact—their sentences flowed seamlessly, they put their characters through satisfying arcs, and even the acknowledgements section was polished to a shine.
For the longest time, I compared myself to others. I resented myself for failing to live up to my own impossibly high standards. I struggled to call myself a writer, worried I would desecrate the label if my writing was bad. I thought all talented authors were born with a sixth sense, that they were destined since conception to know exactly what to say and how to say it. This mindset threw me into a creative rut. I considered giving up on writing because I didn’t think I could ever live up to my standards that only heightened with each book I read.
All of this changed when I finished high school. One day, I was comparing myself to classicists, and the next, I stopped caring. I wrote in choppy sentences. I made my characters awkward and off-putting. I changed my font color to white so I wouldn’t edit as I wrote. When I let myself write badly, I began to write more, and as I wrote more, I wrote better. I can’t pinpoint one moment in which this change happened—it was likely due to a combination of growing up and growing sick of my own self-doubting behavior—but I wanted to see what would happen if I threw everything I knew out the window.
When I drafted my upcoming novel Vaguely Human Figures, I put “[add more]” or “[fix later]” wherever I hadn’t figured out the ending of a scene. I let myself write sloppily and break grammar rules I’m typically a stickler for. I let my characters represent my worst traits, and I let them make bad decisions. I rest assured knowing I would fix the errors later, that it was okay to let go of my expectations for the drafting stage. I finished that draft solely because I approached it with no expectations and had no one to impress. It was a raw representation of my head and my heart at the time. The best part was that I learned other authors did the same thing—writing a bad first draft was common practice, and rewriting was the fairy dust that turned these drafts into solid stories. (Indeed, putting Vaguely Human Figures through six rounds of edits has brushed it into much better shape with no brackets).
In Vaguely Human Figures, my main character is a genius composer commissioned to write a musical for an exorbitant sum of money. During the process, he’s challenged to confront his flaws and collaborate with other musicians in situations where he no longer has the upper hand. Insecurity lies at the crux of his character, which is heavily inspired by my struggles to feel validated as an artist. By writing this book, I felt like I was representing the toxic creator’s mentality I had in the past, and more than that, biding that version of myself farewell.
I would not have been able to finish this novel had I believed everything I wrote had to be “good” and “correct.” To be honest, I don’t think I ever defined what “good writing” was, not even when I was obsessed with making mine just that. Now, I strive to write authentically. After Vaguely Human Figures, I drafted a novel temporarily and tentatively titled Continents. The first draft is undercooked and messy and full of plot holes, and yet, I’m proud of it. It, too, is a distillation of my innermost thoughts. For the first time since I was a child, writing feels like a method of self expression rather than a vehicle to impress people.
In retrospect, no one has truly got their act together, and I wish I’d known earlier that I didn’t have pressure myself to get mine. I am allowed to write poorly and be messy and disorganized, because all of that represents reality. A book that comes from the soul easily trumps one from the head and its technical pedantics. When I let go of the person I think I have to be, I write authentically, and that authenticity is what turns a writer into a genuine artist.
Jina Jeon is a writer, editor, and college student based in Los Angeles and Chicago. You can find her on Instagram @jinaswriting.
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