Once, I wrote this terrible story for my creative writing class. It was about how a princess waited years for her prince to come back from war, only to find him wounded upon his return. It was bleak, it rhymed, it fit the assignment … but it was still terrible. I mean, there was no character development, no purpose to anyone’s actions. It was sort of like muddling through “Glitter,” only worse, because I knew even before I started writing that it would be bad, but I wrote anyway.

Like any other skill, writing takes time. Not even “good” writing — just writing succinctly, correctly, grammatically takes time. All the flourishes and stylistic touches come much later. But every time I sit down to write, I don’t really let myself practice. Rather, I spend as much time possible fixing all my mistakes before I make them.

This is not a good thing. Maybe in any other pursuit, zoning in on faults is a quick way to identify the small problems before they erupt into terror. But writing isn’t as easy as “right” and “wrong,” and mistakes can often lead to greatness.

“I wrote like 20 pages before I got to the good stuff. It’s like I had to get the bad writing out of the way in order to reach the good,” my high school English teacher would endlessly tell us. We’d listen, engrossed, feeling good about the importance of writing. A simple concept, and yet terribly deceiving: Though writing may benefit from diligent disappointment, not many other subjects do.

Babied by my high school experiences, I reached the University with high hopes. Young and naïve, I signed up for multiple English courses, hoping to continue on my self-righteous writing path. And then, I was slammed with four papers due within a few days of each other, all seven-page monsters and, oh, yeah, don’t forget the chemistry midterm! Everything sucked, and I didn’t have time to focus on “getting the bad writing out of the way,” because I was too busy sinking.

And so, the bad-writing habits began. I wrote defensively, preventing any wrong word from slipping out — I didn’t trust myself to write without getting off-track, and so the things I wrote were safe, boring and, sometimes, terrifying.

I was in my Upper-Level Writing class, toiling away on my comparison of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, when my friend first brought it up: “Do you ever get too scared to write?” At first I didn’t understand the question. It’s not like essays were a dangerous mission — the worst thing that could happen was carpal tunnel.

But soon, it started making sense. Staring at an open document, the single blank page waiting to be filled is daunting. Writing badly is intimidating. Filling up 20 pages with excellent phrases like “his skin was like marble, only soft” is mortifying. And so, writing defensively and dispassionately is a better alternative to finding enough time to weed through hours of poorly written plot and dialogue.

Perhaps the reason more people aren’t writers is because no one has time to witness their stupidity over and over again. Maybe there are few and far between courageous enough to spend the time needed confronting their inner writer. Even now, as I write this column, I’m reminded of my unedited draft waiting in my documents. It sends a shiver of panic down my spine: Do I ace the paper, spending far more time than I have on it, or do I study for my midterm? Do I conquer my fear or do I cower, prolonging the inevitable spewing of shitty writing? Maybe I’ll start tackling the art of writing well this summer. Or, maybe not. The possibilities, though few, seem hard to accept.

But somewhere, among the archived essays and B+ papers, there’s a document dedicated to the suckage that is my bad writing, and every once in a while, the number of pages grows.