My father-in-law subscribes to a daily word puzzle, and about once a week he passes one of them on to me. A circle of seven letters, and you can use them in any combination, with as many repeats as you need, to figure out the word.
Sometimes I sit down and the puzzle unfolds in an instant. That happened a couple of weeks ago. As soon as I saw the circle of letters, the answer was clear. That always feels good.
Other times, though (and more often, if I am being honest), the circle is just a jumble of letters. I have to begin to push and pull them in different directions, trying out one combination and then another.
I should mention that I have the type of brain that abhors open loops. That is to say, once I get started on a problem, it is very hard for me to let it go and just walk away. More and more of my processing power gets focused on finding the solution. My wife and family have grown to appreciate this about me, but I also know it has been a source of great aggravation to acquaintances, employers, and my dissertation committee. I do not half-ass puzzles.
When this happens—when I get stuck needing the solution but the solution is elusive—I have noticed a pattern. I will sit with intense focus for a long period of time, sometimes up to an hour, grinding my gears and getting nowhere on the puzzle. I start generating lists of letter combinations, most of them utter nonsense. I get nowhere, and my anxiety increases. More lists, more grind, no progress.
Then something pulls me away. It’s time for dinner, say, or there is real work to do. So I get up and leave the half-finished task, my list of nonsense, and go on to the next thing.
Then, about twenty minutes later, I blink suddenly. The word is there, the word for while I was so diligently searching. It lights upon my shoulder like a butterfly and just sits there. Oh, hello. Were you looking for me?
This scenario plays out with some regularity, and quite predictably. It always leaves me feeling a mixture of relief and bewilderment. I am glad the loop is closed, but I also wonder why the right word was not there from the get-go.
That is to say, why did I have to write so many wrong words to get to the right ones?
You see, in my mind, there is a narrative that goes something like this: I need to get things right on the first try, or I’m not getting them right at all. Maybe I’m the only one who has this script running, but I bet I am not alone in this.
That script is powerful. Sometimes, it keeps me from trying at all, or it convinces me to give up for long stretches of time, or to give up entirely, once I see that I won’t get something right off the bat. The script is insidious, and relentless, and try as I might it is very hard to countermand, let alone root out entirely.
This is why I have to keep reminding myself of the first rule: Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. If I have made the decision that I value an outcome, I have to be willing to suck (often in public!) on the way to reaching that outcome.
Because, you see, I have become convinced that the wrong words are a necessary part of the process. I have become convinced (after piles and piles or repeated attempts and massive empirical evidence) that if I did not generate that list of wrong words, the right one would not have come to me.
The gear-grinding is painful, yes, but it seems to be necessary.
And I remind myself of this as I receive yet another patient email from my editor at Yale, asking when to expect the revisions for The Accessorized Bible. She is patient because I long ago blew the deadline for the first draft, and once I got that turned in, I proceeded to blow the deadline (twice already!) for these revisions.
The contract is for 60,000 words, and at this point, I have written right around 240,000. Most of those words are the wrongs ones (for this project, at least)—but this summer, after beating my head against that wall day after day, I am increasingly confident that I have found mostly the right ones.
So I will write her back, things look good to send you something by the first of the month.
And then I get back to the frustrating work of generating the words, and circling back, and feeling the gears lock. Then I get up and do something important and real (clean the fridge, hug my kids, fix a broken coffee mug handle) and better words come.
From where? I don’t know. Why weren’t they here the first time? I don’t know.
But I know they wouldn’t have come on their own. For some reason, the right words need piles of the wrong words to arrive before they show themselves.
The wrong words matter too.