I've spent the last month or so with my head buried in a grant application. I've been working on a documentary photography project for the last several months and I've bootstrapped it the entire way. Meaning any cost associated with the project have come out of my pockets. No one is paying me to do the project, I'm doing it because I think it's a good project and the stories involved are worth being told.

I've learned a lot about myself and my project during the grant application process so I thought I'd write about a few tips/things I've learned because they might help another artist/writer struggling with the grant process.

1. Everyone has a first time.
No one comes out of the womb knowing how to write a grant proposal or application. The first few times you do it you're just going to have to muddle your way through it until you figure out what you're doing. You can ask people for help and they might give you good advice but it's still going to be you muddling through it. Don't let the fact that you don't know exactly what to do or you don't know exactly what the review committee wants to discourage. If you've made the commitment to apply for the grant then follow through. Even if you think your application doesn't have a chance of being accepted do the work to get the application completed. Having your first one done is going to make the second one much easier to complete.

2. It's a learning experience
I guarantee that you'll learn some things about yourself and your project during the process of writing the application. I learned about some of my insecurity triggers, learned that the vision I had for my project needed to be seriously tweaked, and that my work samples needed to be much stronger. Those were hard lessons to learn but I'm glad I learned them and I think they made my grant application stronger.

3. Writing is Easy
That's bullshit right? Yes but also no. While working on my grant application I found Scott Berkun's Writing Hacks Part 1. The first line is "Writing is easy, it's quality that's hard." True enough Scott, true enough. He goes on to say

Writing is easy, it's quality that's hard. Any idiot who knows 5 words can write a sentence (e.g. "Dufus big much Scott is"). It might be grammarless, broken, or inaccurate but it is writing. This means that when people can't start they're imagining the precision of the end, all polished and brilliant, a vision that makes the ugly clumsy junkyard that all beginnings are, impossible to accept. Good voice, tone, rhythm, ideas and grammar are essential to good writing, but they're never introduced all at once. I promise you, the first draft of Strunk and White didn't follow Strunk and White. The secret, if you can't start, is to begin without constraints. Deliberately write badly, but write.

For this reason writer's block is a sham. Anyone who wrote yesterday can write today, it's just a question of if they can do it to their own satisfaction. It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's its fear of not writing well; something quite different. Certainly every writer has moments of paralysis, but the way out is to properly frame what's going on, and writer's block, as commonly misunderstood, is a red herring.

Those two paragraphs really, really resonated with me and helped me conquer the much dreaded "description of activities" section of my grant application that had had me paralyzed. I had stared at blank page after blank page. I had started and deleted paragraphs time and again. I had been unable to move forward because I couldn't get the first paragraph right. Berkun's words were a kick in the pants that let me write the "shitty first draft" and move on.

So I very much encourage you to accept that ever single thing you write needs a shitty first draft before it can be any good, including your grant applications or proposals. Don't try to hit it out of the park with the first swing. Just get a draft down on paper. 98% of it will probably suck but there will nuggets of good work in there that you'll be on with each successive draft.

4. Most of Us Won't Get the Grant But It's Worth Trying Anyway
I don't think I'm going to get the grant I applied for. My work samples were still a bit too work and my project not honed tightly enough toward the organization giving the grant. I don't regret any of the time I spent on the application though. I learned from the experience, sharpened some "writing about myself" skills, made necessary tweaks to my project and got my name and work in front of the review committee. These are all really positive developments.