I strongly believe that writing is an act of
courage. It’s almost an act of physical courage. You get up and you have this
great idea. Maybe you were hanging out with your friends—you guys were having
beers and you were talking about something. You had this idea and they said,
“Wow, that’s brilliant! Someone should go write it.” And you sit down to write
it and almost always what was brilliant before, when you were sitting around
talking, is somehow not so brilliant when you go to write. It’s as though you
have a certain music in your head, and trying to get that music out on a page is
absolute hell. And so you fail. If you’re doing it correctly, what happens is,
the translation of what you hear in your head, what your idea is in your head,
will almost always come out really badly on the page when you first write, okay?
But what you have to do is you have to give yourself a day, go back, revise over
and over and over again until you get something that is at least maybe 70
percent of what you wanted to do. You try to go from really bad to okay to
acceptable. Then you know you’ve done your job. I never really get to that
perfect thing that was in my head, so I always consider the entire process about
failure. I think that’s the main reason why more people don’t write. It’s very
depressing in that way.
TA-NEHISI COATES
