"When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it"
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Perfectionism is just stage fright dressed up as craft. Irvine Welsh, a novelist who built his reputation on voices that are messy, profane, and ferociously alive, cuts straight through the beginner fantasy that writing arrives fully formed. The repetition of "every sentence... every paragraph... every chapter" mimics the spiraling self-surveillance that stalls new writers: you keep zooming in, polishing fragments, because committing to the imperfect whole feels like exposure.
The key move is his reframing of the first draft as private space. "Not any kind of public show" is more than reassurance; it's a demotion of the inner critic. Welsh is attacking the imagined audience that hovers over the keyboard, turning composition into performance. That imagined crowd is what makes people write safe, write small, write like they're being graded. By insisting the work isn't public "until you're ready for it", he restores writing to its actual process: draft first, decide later what deserves daylight.
Context matters: Welsh comes from a tradition that prizes authenticity over refinement, where the rawness is the point and correctness is often a lie. His subtext is almost punk in its ethics: stop trying to sound like a finished writer and start doing the work that produces finish. The intent isn't to excuse sloppiness; it's to relocate rigor to the right phase. Get it down. Then make it good.
The key move is his reframing of the first draft as private space. "Not any kind of public show" is more than reassurance; it's a demotion of the inner critic. Welsh is attacking the imagined audience that hovers over the keyboard, turning composition into performance. That imagined crowd is what makes people write safe, write small, write like they're being graded. By insisting the work isn't public "until you're ready for it", he restores writing to its actual process: draft first, decide later what deserves daylight.
Context matters: Welsh comes from a tradition that prizes authenticity over refinement, where the rawness is the point and correctness is often a lie. His subtext is almost punk in its ethics: stop trying to sound like a finished writer and start doing the work that produces finish. The intent isn't to excuse sloppiness; it's to relocate rigor to the right phase. Get it down. Then make it good.
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| Topic | Writing |
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