the rom-com that taught me how to write

I learned my greatest piece of writing advice from a rom-com.

(Sorry to my first editor…my mom)

If you’ve never seen “Set It Up,” run – don’t walk – to watch it. It’s on Netflix. It’s fantastic. But regardless of the 10/10 plot, it also truly gave me a lesson in writing that I live by every day.

Long story short, the main character has hit her low point in the movie. You know, she lost the job, she lost the guy, she’s spending days in her apartment eating Chinese food. And, she’s trying to write her first ever article: a story about centenarian Olympians. But she can’t do it. She can’t write a single word, because her writing is crap.

Enter her angel of a roommate who reminds her: “of course your first draft is gonna be bad…and then you know what you do? You go back and make it better. But you can’t make it better until you actually do it.”

This advice really hits home because she delivers it a tone leaning more “what the f*** do you mean you’re a bad writer, you’re not even a writer right now,” than gentle coaxing. In true best friend fashion.

“You’re not a bad writer yet,” she says.

After this, our main character writes her story. And the rest is history. (It’s a rom-com, there is no such thing as spoilers. We all know how it ends.)

Good writing is just rewriting. It’s a lot easier to tweak a sentence to make it better than to write a sentence that is perfect. Trust me, I’ve tried. And you just end up sitting with an empty page for days spiraling into writers’ block hell. It’s especially unhelpful if you suffer from any form of imposter syndrome.

So write something. And go from there.