First Draft Anxiety

I am close to over it! All the doubts are
so familiar now. The material doesn’t come at a faster rate than it ever has,
but I expect that. The best quality material, as has been said by many authors,
comes first when you don’t know where you’re going with what you’re writing,
what comes next. Re-framing that as healthy as opposed to anxiety-inducing is a
great idea! I’m about a third of the way through this first draft, I reckon,
and here are some thoughts from my anxiety stream that I have become so
familiar with that I don’t take any of them seriously anymore:

This is the best thing I’ve ever written;
this is the worst thing I’ve ever written; I’m not writing this fast enough; I’m
not taking enough time to consider these sentences; this scene isn’t going to
be long enough; this scene became too long!; writing about this is too
personal: it’s scaring me; writing this stopped scaring me: it’s going flat!; are
you basing this on any kind of fact or is this just your opinion? That has
little value!; this is too factual and not imaginative enough: this is a story,
not an essay!;this scene is too exciting; I’m not using enough fancy words; enough
fancy words? What a stupid thing to think: I’m being too pretentious!; I’m
being too on-the-nose; I’m not hitting the target enough!; I don’t know where
this is going; I know too much about where this is going: it’s not free enough!;
this act isn’t going to be long enough; this act is too long: too many words
before more stuff starts happening!; this character is too close to someone I
know: I need to change it!; this character is too far away from anyone I know:
the guy he’s based on wouldn’t say that!; this story is too similar to stuff I’ve
already written: I’m running out of ideas!; am I sure this scene works? It’s
not like anything I’ve ever written and I can’t think of a writer to compare it
to: that’s bad! That’s good! Is it?!; you started this off based on the work of
WRITER, and now your writing style is diverging too much from theirs for you to
use their typical story structure; you’re imitating WRITER too much! Get off
the rails!; you’re thinking too much about this story when you’re not writing
about it: Hemingway advised against that! You’re going to control it too much and
it will appear quite stiff!; You’re not thinking about this enough when you’re
not writing about it: you’ll return tomorrow and be dead rusty!; there’s too
much dialogue in this scene and not enough description!; there’s too much
description here: we need to get to the dialogue faster!

Given that I write for maybe 1-2 hours a
day I have time to tell myself these things, I don’t know, a hundred times
each, maybe? And how many of them are useful? None. So now I just let them
chatter on behind some door in my head and I can only hear the muffled sound of
them. I’ll bring most of these questions back out during the re-drafting, but
for now the door is shut.

I never used to understand the difference between
first draft mode and editing mode, but the truth is there’s no way to tell a
story what to be until you can see it in its entirety. This is why there’s
always material to cut, because it usually alludes to paths you didn’t end up
taking, or a balance that an earlier scene needs to achieve with a scene that
wasn’t yet written, or a call-back moment that you couldn’t  have foreseen including. And there’s nothing
wrong with that: if it wasn’t true, it would probably be a sign that you weren’t
a great writer because you were too afraid to let the material take flight a
bit. That doesn’t mean that the perceived uselessness or amazingness of material
during the first draft can’t still torture you until the story is done.

I have a new mantra much kinder than any of
these: it gets done. Write slow, write fast, write well, write badly: it gets
done. It can all be fixed. Sure it would be easier if you could write better
faster, but if you can’t, fuck it: leave yourself the work to do later. It gets
done. If you can’t tell how long it’s gonna take, certainly no one else can,
which means no one can comfort you about this, but it doesn’t matter. It. Gets.
Done.