The Footwear Inspector Waits For The Other Shoe (Photo credit: JD Hancock)
Several years ago, I was working at a small business. Besides myself, there were four other people on the staff and the boss. It was time for our weekly staff meeting and three of us were already there at the table when the boss walked in and said, “Let’s get started.”
We pointed out that the other two were still missing. She said that she’d fired both of them that morning.
The room went dead silent as we three realized that we were it and that our number had been almost halved. There were so many questions, so many worries, and we were all a little bit afraid of saying anything lest we were the next ones to go.
While we held this collective breath, there was a noise from just outside our meeting room. It sounded like something falling and hitting the ground and it was loud enough that we all noticed in the awkward silence.
“What the heck was that?” our boss asked and without even stopping to think I replied, “The other shoe.”
Everyone laughed, and laughed hard, and it perfectly broke the tension. If I had spent weeks thinking about it, I couldn’t have come up with a better joke just then. I’ve had lightning strikes like that throughout my life where I’ve just made an off the cuff comment that, even upon reflection later, was the perfect joke for that moment as if I’d spent weeks crafting it.
The problem is that I can’t do it on purpose. At least, I feel like I can’t. When I sit down to write comedy with the memory of all those times I was effortlessly funny in real life swirling around in my head, everything I write sounds stupid. I get frustrated and annoyed because why can I come up with a great joke in a second without thinking but with time and consideration every word I write sound like I’m hopelessly unfunny and always have been?
Maybe you’ve experienced this too. You’re waxing about the state of the world to a friend over drinks, your phrases turning beautifully, but as soon as you sit down to write about the same topic, everything sounds dull and awful. Where were those clever phrases you had before? Why can’t you sling words like that on command?
This is not something unique to comedy or even writing; it’s common to all art and creation. The best artists are always better in their heads, in private or among friends than they are on stage, however metaphorical that stage may be. When I’m throwing off a random quip at a meeting, there is no pressure to be funny and if my comment is stupid it’s forgotten in a moment. But there’s something about the act of writing it down, of putting it in front of us in black and white, that adds all this additional importance to it, at least in our minds. It paralyses those talents that came so effortlessly back when we weren’t trying. There’s also a certain amount of confidence needed for creation of any kind since the mere act of making something with the purpose of showing it to others implies we think it’s good enough to share. And that’s what makes us chew the ends of our pens off instead of actually writing, because what if it isn’t?
What you imagine you’ll write is always going to sound better in your head than it will on paper. That’s a fact, one you’ll hear echoed from every artist in every discipline from the beginning of time. But the difference between the perpetual aspiring artist and someone who actually gets their ideas down on paper is conquering that fear and just embracing the suck of the first draft. Because the first draft, the first version, of anything is going to be awful and you need to just come to terms with it and keep writing anyway.
Because here’s the good news: Even the parts that seem horrible when you first write them will sound better when you let it rest and revisit it later. And even if time can’t help some words, that’s what editing is for and you’ll find that mental image you had of your story and your writing coming out as you revise. It can help to remember that no one will ever read your first draft so it can be your terrible little secret. They’ll only see the finished version, the one you’ve polished and perfected to exactly what you wanted it to be.
But you’ll never get to that point if you don’t finish something, anything, first.
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
