We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from
the point where they started.
– – – Henry Ward Beecher
You’ve lived through a powerful experience and made it out the other side. You want to tell your story, no, you need to tell your story so you can feel lighter but it’s hard to sit down and write. At the core of most people’s list of reasons to avoid the blank page is fear of mediocrity. In the 1800s, classical composer Antonio Salieri was so jealous of his crony, Mozart’s genius, and so critical of his own work, he pronounced himself “the patron saint of mediocrity.” He couldn’t think of anything worse to be and he unsuccessfully chased greatness all of his life.
Author Tom Robbins describes his relationship to
mediocrity in his novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas:
But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for
you. It’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.
I’ve been a fan of Tom Robbins ever since I read his early book, “Another Roadside Attraction.” I love his turns of phrase like the one above and his outrageous plots and simpatico characters. But I don’t agree with his sentiment about mediocrity because when you demonize anything, it gains power and becomes fair game for avoidance. My thoughts about this may be unpopular among writers since mediocrity is so reviled, but you have to start somewhere.
However long you’ve been writing, your initial attempt will notbe all that good. It will be far from perfect. You can count on that. It might even be awful. But you can’t get what’s in your head onto the page without a few false starts. Surrealist painter Salvador Dali said, “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
You just have to start. Any masterpiece begins with a single paint stroke, a musical note, a dance step or a word. When you’re writing Chapter One, it’s like standing at the edge of a high diving board, toes over the end, drumming up the courage to make the leap. What if you jump and bang your head on the diving board or end up in an embarrassing and painful belly flop? The risk feels great but a few aches, pains, and belly flops are inevitable. If you can swallow your ego and allow yourself to suck at what you’re doing and then keep on doing it, you can only get better. You can eventually rise above mediocrity.
I used to work out at an elite gymnastics studio where girls from ages 5 to 18 showed up every day to practice. When a little girl began to train, she started on a balance beam that was less than a foot off the ground. She tried to walk as she took the necessary steps to learn the technique so she could eventually perform back flips on a beam that stood the requisite four feet from the ground. As she moved across the four-inch-wide surface, one bare foot in front of the other, jumping and twisting, you can bet she was going to fall. I watched what they went through, how their hands slipped off the uneven bars, they hit their heads, they fractured bones, they got shamed by their coaches, they cried in frustration, sprained their ankles and strained their muscles. But little by little, step by step, they got good enough to perform the death-defying feats that placed them in the category of Superhero.
Just like any athletic endeavor, good writing doesn’t happen suddenly or all at once. It’s a day-to-day practice and when you begin, your work usually comes out too jumbled, too sparse, too personal or not personal enough. It’s up to you to keep on going and make it better because writing is a process, not a onetime event.
The gift of mediocrity is finding a jumping off point for your story. Then you can improve the wording and do your best to be authentic. This will take time, something we dislike in this age of attention deficiency. Our society has long been one of instant gratification. We get little encouragement
to build something slowly, from the bottom up, but that’s what it takes to finally be excellent. Or at least very good.
Some years ago, when I read through the initial draft of my first book about the Philippine healers, I was so disgusted with it, I threw the manuscript in a closet and slammed the door. I was done . . . until I opened it a few days later, retrieved the pages and got back to work. After several years, many rewrites and multiple rejections, I got a publishing deal. What if I hadn’t opened that closet door again? What if I had crumbled under the shame of mediocrity and stopped improving my work and looking for a publisher?
Imagine how many great books, paintings, operas, plays and films languish in the back of a closet or on a bottom shelf somewhere, never seeing the light of day because someone was afraid of being mediocre. When you find yourself in a rut, loath to stop writing and afraid to continue, if your work
feels like junk and you have no idea what do, try forgiving yourself. That may sound weird but underneath the anger is a scared child who thinks she’s a loser. And you’ve beaten her to a pulp. The more you harangue and criticize her, the more she turns in on herself since anger begets fear which turns into
paralysis.
When I feel lonely, uncomfortable and untalented, I try to forget about excellence. I see my work as my holy calling, a tile in the mosaic of my spiritual path. All that matters is getting the words on the page and finding the stamina and fortitude to keep on doing it. When you stop expecting perfection and accept mediocrity as a necessary part of the process, you’ll be amazed at the beauty, creativity, and inspiration that emerges from deep inside of you.
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