Let it Suck: Turning Off Your Internal Editor to Find Success

Today, I want to give you permission that you might not be realizing you’ve been withholding from yourself: Today, you can suck.

I mean it. You have permission to get out your pen and notebook (or, more likely, to open your word processor) and just suck. Write poorly. Be bad. Just suck.

In fact, I’m not just giving you the go-ahead. Consider this post my strong suggestion to suck today. This is my personal request to you to go write badly. I’ll beg if I have to. Do it for me. Go suck. Vomit your words on the page. Don’t fret the grammar. Make a spelling mistake and leave it to be fixed later. Take fifteen minutes and write something that you don’t feel capable of writing. Jump into the middle of a muddled scene that you don’t know what to do with.

Let it suck, guys.

Why? Why am I encouraging you to be bad? Why am I imploring you to write poorly?

Because you deserve to. And the reasons why have nothing to do with your current abilities. You deserve the permission to suck because it’s going to give you at least 3 really important benefits.

We have to fail to succeed

Until you get comfortable doing something poorly, you’ll never be able to do it well. Waiting to write until you get better at writing is insanity defined. We don’t wait until the big game to learn to shoot free throws. We don’t get on stage not knowing the steps and just hope the dance recital goes well.

All this suggests that you need to be practicing which means you need to be given permission to fail. You will do it wrong before you do it right. You’re going to write drivel before it’s any good. An old adage I agree with says that there exists no good writing, only good rewriting. I buy that.

Suck a little. Get a little better. Suck at something else. Get better at that. You need to let yourself be bad so you can become good. There’s no golden road here, no single path to greatness that doesn’t lead through the forest of bad writing.

Do you want to be great tomorrow? Today, you need to suck.

Your internal editor is a real bastard

I’d use stronger language if I weren’t actively repressing my bottled up rage about what internal editors rob us of. Your internal editor isn’t your friend during the writing process. It wants you to stop writing.

Here’s a riddle: if you stop writing to edit, what are you? An editor. Sit at the keyboard or grab your notebook and pen of choice and give your editor the day off. You only need to call it back in when you have something for it to do—when you have a finished work to revise, rewrite, and shape into something publishable. Until that phase, this member of your internal team is only going to get in the way.

Your internal editor means well. It wants you to put out good work that the world will love reading. Its continued presence, however, is unacceptable. It will drag you down and cause you to not finish projects. It will feed your imposter syndrome. It will pause good work because it isn’t perfect or right—whatever that means.

Giving yourself permission to suck and to fail tells your editor to back off. Remember this: you are not your work. Your value is not determined by the quality of the words on the page. Whether or not you are a good writer isn’t decided by the worst thing you’ve ever written any more than the greatest gymnast’s talent being decided by their worst practice session.

If you are a writer and you haven’t yet brought a project to full completion, you need to. Stop being an editor. Let yourself write. And if you have brought something to full completion, congratulations! Do it again. And again. This career doesn’t often reward singular effort. Multiply your effort and give it the years it needs—and turn the editor off when it comes around so you can focus on getting the work done.

You’re a better writer than you think you are

There’s a story frequently shared in writing circles from Neil Gaiman that I think is valuable here. (If you haven’t read any of his body of work, you now have homework. I recommend Good Omens (a brilliant work he co-authored with Terry Pratchett), though you really can’t go wrong.) The original is linked here:

Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.

Imposter syndrome might well be ubiquitous. Unless you’re a classical narcissist or have legitimate megalomania, you’re probably cooler, better, and more talented than you think you are. The thing is, you’re also likely your harshest and worst critic. You spend a lot of time with yourself and you think you understand that you can’t be all that fantastic because anyone who had the same insight to your head that you do would be utterly unconvinced of your brilliance.

You might be self-conscious about your writing because it’s dear to you. There’s probably some little aspect of you that came very naturally and isn’t of extreme importance to you (perhaps you brew brilliant coffee or make amazing mac and cheese without trying) that you dismiss merely because it isn’t something you’ve chosen as a cornerstone of your identity. The naturally gifted mac-maker probably doesn’t go around calling themself “The Macaroni Guy.”

But you call yourself a writer. That’s big. You identify yourself by this portion of your soul, this portion of your time spent on an activity. It’s clearly important to you. So it’s no wonder that you’re self-conscious about your ability. It’s no wonder you second-guess yourself. This is who you are so if it isn’t good enough, what does that say about you?

Well, to be frank, nothing. Because if you never allow yourself to actually finish something, no one will ever read it. You are not defined by your worst writing. Your worth isn’t determined by how brilliant or bad the words on the page are. If it’s not up to snuff, you can and should fix it in a revision process.

But you have to do it first. You’re likely better than you know. And I’ll guarantee that you’ll never get to be as good as you want or need to be if you aren’t finishing projects to completion.

You deserve to let yourself suck

Let it be bad, guys. Or, perhaps, just let it be. Let it exist. And give yourself the permission to let that first draft be the worst thing you’ve ever read—I can almost guarantee we’ve all read something worse, anyhow. Giving yourself permission to suck lets off a lot of unnecessary pressure. Giving yourself permission to write instead of edit will make you a better writer.

Put in the time and effort to grow. Make the work happen. Finish a project. Then let your editor out and make revisions to your work that get it closer to where you want it to be. This is all a learning process and we are all becoming the writers we want to be.

You deserve the freedom to suck. So, take it and go write something without worrying about whether or not it’s good. It’ll become better after you’ve finished it.