“If you want to be a good writer,
you gotta have the courage
to be a bad writer.”
I was reading to my son before bed – normal routine. I finished a passage with such eternal wisdom, I had to stop the story to take a blurry photo of the page:
This scene carries over a theme from the first book, in which the little frogs were so afraid to fail at writing a comic, they didn’t want to even try. So their teacher told them, as their first assignment, to purposely fail at writing a comic.
Now, here they are, wiser from the experience.
I, wise from all my failures, had to make sure my son understood this salient point.
“Why is it good to fail?” I asked him.
“So you can be good at something,” he restated from what we just read.
“OK, but you missed a step. You don’t just become good. When you try something new, you’re probably not going to be good at it. But you try anyway. And you’re probably gonna fail. But you learn lessons on how to be better. Got it?”
“OK.”
“When I started writing, I was not great even though people had to read it. But I stuck with it, learning good things to do and bad things not to do. And one day, I wasn’t so bad anymore!”
“Yeah.”
“What’s something you’ve failed at first but gotten better at with practice?”
“Dad, can you just keep reading?’”
“OK, buddy.”