The curse of overthinking is to be aware of in the moment what everyone else is after the fact—that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. That you’re afraid. You can read an interview with any one of the “great writers,” be they the literary greats of English class or your own personal heroes, and you’ll hear one thing over and over again: “I’m never satisfied. The work is done, but it’s not complete. Because it never can be.”
To know that that your work can be better, and to have the strength of mind to declare it “finished” anyway—that seems important. To put it down on paper in the first place seems more important still.
Between a blank page and a finished product, there is a lot of space, space enough to contain multiple drafts. Space that holds overlong paragraphs, nonsensical sentences, and the fumbling of ideas not yet fully formed. When you look back on the first draft of anything, it’s easy to feel almost insulted. “I didn’t write that. That’s crap. Look at the finished product, this masterpiece I have crafted. Surely it could not have come from that.” From what I can tell, most people have those thoughts about their work—after they read it. Overthinkers have those thoughts while they’re trying to write it in the first place.
One of the things I remember from science class is this: if something is moving at 60 mph, it had to have been moving at every speed between 0 mph and 60 mph before that. That means, even if you have a car that goes from 0 to 60 in 6 seconds, at some point in those 6 seconds, the car was moving at 27 mph, and at 45 mph, and at 59.9 mph.
The impossible goal of the overthinker is to put a finished work directly onto a blank page. We don’t want a car that goes from 0 to 60 in 6 seconds. We just want the car to go 60.
I attended a one-hour screenwriting class a few years ago, and there’s one thing I learned that I’ve remembered ever since. The teacher told us that 80% of screenwriters fail because of self-editing. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, self-editing means to write and rewrite over and over in your head, refusing to put anything down on paper until it’s perfect. It is the embodiment of overthinking.
Self-editing was an issue I became well acquainted with in college. I remember a time where I was attempting to work on a midterm paper that was two weeks overdue. I just kept sitting in front of my computer, turning the words and ideas over and over in my head, but my fingers didn’t move. Finally, my roommate, in utter frustration, turned from his own computer to look up at me and said “Just write something!” His reasoning was that, at this point, two weeks overdue, writing something, anything, was better than turning in nothing at all.
Of course, my roommate was right. Something is better than nothing (especially when your paper is already two weeks late). But to make that something, there’s a part of my brain that I need to turn off. I can’t be editor and writer all at the same time. That warring dialogue is the thing that insanity and missed deadlines are made of.
When I’m self-editing, I won’t put a sentence down because it doesn’t perfectly articulate the point I’m trying to make. Or I’ll stop myself in the middle of writing because I can’t see exactly where the story or the post is going. Another important lesson from science class was to avoid using the words “never” and “always”—another good principle to take to heart. But in this case, I feel confident in saying that self-editing is never helpful. It doesn’t lead to better writing; it leads to no writing. It leads to a brain full of ideas and a dozen unfilled notebooks to go with them.
Self-editing is not helpful because it causes us to aim for something even more unattainable than perfection—perfection on the first try. It also misses the whole damn point of writing—discovery. I’ve had a character tell me something about himself I never knew until he hit the page and started talking—even though he’d lived in my head for years. I’ve had one blog post turn into another during the course of writing it, changing from what I had in mind to something else entirely. Those things happened because I put imperfect words down on paper, and I worked with them.
Overthinking, at its core, is an effective way for us to lie to ourselves. It’s a way for me to tell myself that while I may stumble as a writer, I know it. I see all of the flaws, clear as day. That’s my mental trick for getting around my current skill level. I can see beyond my present abilities, which must mean that they aren’t actually my present abilities. I’m better than that.
Of course, I do not see all the flaws. I am not better than that. More importantly, picking out flaws is extremely easy. I know this. It’s one of the few things I’ve been able to do consistently. It is easy to point at a car and say “It only goes from 0 to 60 in 11 seconds. It is slow.” It is much, much harder to design that car, to build it, and then to work to improve it.
There is a time and a place for doubt. There is a time and a place for editing. That time and place come after the initial act of writing. Not during it. The two cannot coexist, at least not in my experience.
The curse of overthinking is to spend life inside your head. For the most part, that’s where my writing has stayed. But not anymore.
I have notebooks to fill.