My best writing advice

1. just do something arbitrary, for God's sake

You know, I look at a lot of memes. Between the ones I show myself when I should be doing something more productive, and the ones my husband sends me while he’s at work throughout the day, I see… a lot of memes. 

Funnily enough, it’s apparent to me from the abundance of memes about writing that writers not only shirk their work by looking at memes, they also shirk by making memes about shirking.

I saw a comic today where one character has written a to-do list, and laments to another character that they have no idea where on the to-do list to start.

And my immediate thought was “at the top, you idiot.”

All insults aside, I’m perfectly serious. Why not just start at the top? Is the order of operations on your to-do list so vital yet indiscernible that you can’t begin until you figure it out, therefore you can’t begin at all? What if you let yourself stop overthinking and just do the first thing on the list, regardless of what it is?

Maybe you’d actually end up checking some things off your list that way, rather than banging your head against a wall (or simply staring blankly at it).

Look, I’m the first to admit I have a perfectionism problem. The idiot here is me. And perfectionism has stopped me from starting many a venture in the past—and from finishing them. The proof: I have never succeeded in carving a bar of soap, I’m mortally afraid to practice my Spanish in front of real humans, and I still haven’t mastered Chopin’s minute waltz. 

Following this pattern, it would be so easy to get lodged in my own brain trying to determine which item on my writing to-do list is most important, but at some point I’ll have to make a choice. 

So maybe, if I want to be successful in my endeavor to create something, I should start by allowing myself something arbitrary, something that will hurt no one by existing. Like starting at the top of the list—or the bottom, or the middle if you’re a psychopath—every time, no matter what. Like choosing a favorite pen on a whim for no good reason. Like only writing when you’re wearing your navy blue oversized cardigan. Whatever your craft, let some part of it breathe, exist in all its mundanity.

There is no pressure in the arbitrary. There is no dire urgency. There’s only a something like the ground, and a sense of identity in where you’re standing. There’s only a place to begin.