It's okay to suck even though it sucks

I have trouble writing during the week, so some weeks I only get to write one day, usually Sunday. I make sure of that, actually. If I don't write any other day of the week, I always make sure I write on Sunday. I had trouble enforcing that when I was taking that stupid class for work, but now all that's over I really really hope, so Sundays are back to writing days.

Yesterday I set out to write 8 pages, but that would have put me on page 13 and I am uncomfortable with prime numbers, so I stopped on page 12. Yes that means I wrote 7 pages, which is also a prime number, which does make me slightly uncomfortable but not as uncomfortable as stopping on page 13. And yes I am completely insane.

But despite my weird OCD hangups, I cranked out seven really bad pages Sunday. So bad I wrote little notes to myself throughout that say things like "This shit is boring. Make it not suck."

Some days I sit in front of the computer and I pour gold onto that screen. my tiny - they are freakishly tiny - hands just pluck away at those keys, and what I'm left with is a magnificent series of events I can't help but reread like three times just to bask in its brilliance.

Sunday was not one of those days. Sunday was the other kind of day, the one where you know you have to write it so you write it, but you also know that everything you're writing will need to be rewritten. I hate those days. They're not so much fun.

This is probably one of the most difficult tasks a writer has to do - writing pages that suck. It's in our nature to want it to be good so sometimes we get all held up on writing and rewriting until it's just right and it takes forever to get through a handful of pages. Last weekend I only wrote three pages, partly because of a computer virus, but also partly because I rewrote those three pages three times. I need to get a move-on with this script, so as difficult as it is, this week I ignored my desperate desire to polish this turd.

Here at the beginning of the script I'm just learning these people. I wrote up back stories, but you don't really know what you're characters are going to do until you've seen what they already did. That means, for me at least, a lot of experimentation at the beginning, a lot of long dialogue exchanges where people explain shit that I need to know but shit that's not very interesting.

In the first rewrite I go back through and remove the things my characters are saying just to me so I can replace it with interesting stuff. This first draft is about getting the story on paper. The good stuff comes later, but first you have to set the framework.

It's tedious and not as much fun as writing the golden stuff, but it has to be done. I have to say to myself, "Self, you suck. And that's okay as long as you don't suck in prime numbered amounts."