Be Willing to Write Badly
April 30, 2018 § 46 Comments
by Jan Priddy
Karen Karbo spends twenty minutes each morning ranting on yellow pads of paper before she begins her real writing for the day. William Stafford famously began his days by writing an aphorism and then the draft of a poem. In his book of writing advice, The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo warns against writing with a pen, erasing a mark, and that we should use lined paper with green lines. He also writes that he hopes he doesn’t teach others to write, “but how to teach yourself to write.”
My first creative writing teacher, Sandra Dorr, described being stranded in Europe and completely blocked from writing by her interior nay-saying voice. We all hear that voice. It tells us that our writing is hopeless, clunky, too specific or too general, without purpose or meaning even to ourselves. Personify the critical voice the way Jamaica Kincaid does briefly in “Girl” and allow it to have its say, and that nay-sayer will shut every one of us down.
We should not let that happen.
Freewriting, the deliberate writing of whatever pops into our heads, is one way to shut down the nay-saying voice. There is no editor allowed in freewriting. Words spill onto the page without judgement. Accident and mess are welcomed onto our pages. Random, weird, confused, repetitive—sometimes it is the only way to sneak past our critical sentinel who consistently, insistently demands that we write better than we are able to write.
We speak about 125 words per minute, but we think words at least four times this pace. Our observations of visual images and sound and touch and taste are vastly more complex. All of this happens much faster than we can write about it.
When I write as fast as I can, even with a word processor, my thinking obviously outstrips my word recording. In order to stay on my topic on the page or screen, I notice inconsequential details. I see and hear and think about the words I type in order to prevent my mind from wandering off the page. I once hand-wrote the word “oatmeal” a dozen times in a freewrite until I found the word “cookies” and could advance to “chocolate chips.” I hear my own voice saying each word I type. I do not allow the naysayer to have any voice at all.
When we are afraid of doing a bad job, we can hardly get started.
When I was trying and failing to write about my father after his death, I finally set the timer on my watch for thirty minutes, sat before my computer, and typed for all I was worth. Most of what I typed was trash, but about a third of the way into my time, I began to remember and describe the visuals and sounds and smells of my father’s tobacco pipes, his expansive answers to my questions, and the salmon-colored 3×5 cards he kept in his breast pocket and his fountain pen always filled with blue-black ink. The drawings of a medieval boat and of a nineteenth century clipper. The pink shell he stole from a hermit crab in Fortuna Bay. The terrible distortion of his fingers from arthritis.
In a half hour, I did not have a draft, but I had a start.
Karen Karbo says she does not reread her yellow pads, but keeps them just the same. William Stafford did not publish 365 poems a year, but writing that many drafts gave him material for what he did during the remainder of his day: revision.
Everything that is to become must first find a start. I do not believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in fear of bad writing. William Stafford didn’t believe in writer’s block either. He insisted the only way to keep going when the ideas did not seem “good enough” was to “just lower your standards and keep going.”
Richard Hugo warns against writing with a pen, and that we should use lined paper with green lines.
I like green ink and I never use lined pages. I usually write with a fountain pen on the plain square pages of a journal. Most of what I write is drivel. The greatest skill of any good writer is a willingness to write badly.
____
Jan Priddy’s work has earned fellowships, awards, and publication. Aside from nonfiction, her last project is a novel about recovery from grief, and her current work is science fiction short stories. An MFA graduate from Pacific University, She lives and teaches writing in the NW corner of her home state of Oregon. Her new blog is https://janpriddyoregon.wordpress.com.
thank for this… it was insightful and helpful.
I have to remind myself of this regularly. I’m glad it’s useful to you!
Thank you thank you! Reading what you’ve written here is a great way to battle the nay sayer and start writing in the morning!
Oh that nay-sayer! Sometimes it drowns our words and we have to shut it out of the room!
I love the idea of ranting on a yellow pad in the morning to clear one’s head. I do that sometimes with my blog.
Getting that energy going like running light to warm up before the race! Shift that energy.
This is exactly what I needed. Onwards!
And upwards! I need it myself most days!
Please note that the original title of this essay was ungrammatical and deliberately so: “Be Willing: Write Bad”
I am a little disappointed that someone thought readers would not figure that out.
At least “someone” should have recognized that you were using your words intentionally, and run the revision by you before publishing it.
Excellent advice about the naysayer, who visits us all, apparently.
But I have my own query about the Richard Hugo attribution. By “green lined paper” didn’t he mean green paper with lines, not paper with green lines? Granted, the sentence construction is ambiguous; however, green paper is easy to find (think steno books and accounting books, often pale green to protect the user’s eyes from glare). Paper with green lines would require a more intensive search. Hugo was a practical guy.
Well, Anna, that would be my mistake (I wrote bad) or my confusion. What he wrote was: “Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed. Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction. Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes.” I have always assumed he meant pages with green lines (blue lines were very common back in the day). I ignore that recommendation. He also warned never to erase, and that is a rule I follow. And it’s the reason I write in ink. My students are used to using pencil and neatly erasing and correcting their work in math classes. I encourage them to “strike out words” when they make a mistake. Hugo taught me to become the writer I need to be, so he achieved his goal with me at least.
Excellent advice. The best and most consistent writing I’ve ever done was when I wrote morning pages for 30 minutes every day, and then got down to serious writing. 🙂
You, Karen, and Bill! (And the rest of us—I always start a writing project three or fours times on the page, and the trick is figuring out where what I want to say actually starts . . . page three?)
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Thank you for sharing.
“just lower your standards and keep going” is probably the best advice I’ve read in a long time. I’ve been going through a crisis of confidence lately concerning my writing, and I recognize it as perfectionism. Time to let go and just write badly, if that’s what ‘s necessary. Thank you for reminding me of this.
I have to be willing to write badly or I never write at all, and then the second draft often is worse . . . shrieking in my head, reminds me that this happens more often than not.
Thank you.
You are so welcome—good words.
Great post. Thanks for sharing
Thank you for reading!
The “shitty-first-drafts” as Anne Lamott puts it!
Helped me a lot.
I will try the idea of ranting on a yellow paper, new age version.
It’s about shoving the nay-sayer out the door one way or another.
wow.
Thank you, thyme.
Reblogged this on Within A Forest Dark and commented:
“I hear my own voice saying each word I type. I do not allow the naysayer to have any voice at all.” —
Thank you!
You’re welcome! Thank you! I appreciated this.
Just the reading I needed :=) Thanks
That is good to hear—I need to remind myself continuously!
The ‘nay-sayer’ allows me to write at least a page or two before I hear it. How many stories have I ripped up? Maybe your blog will teach me to ignore it in the future.
Thanks
A page at a time will get you there.
Wow…
I couldn’t have found a more perfect time to have read this article.
I have been plagued by this nay-sayer for a long long time. Finally a few days ago I finished writing my first serious blog (atleast I think so) and published it yesterday. It is so gratifying to read that I am not the only one trying to slay this monster. People always talk about good and easy things, nobody admits to the tough times they have been through to reach the good place. So thanks for saying so eloquently what I have said badly. (Feeling super good right now.)
You said it! (And thank you.)
A an individual new to this,this piece really gave me a booster because there is nothing like a tutorial on how to really convey your thoughts to the world.Just be you…Thanks
We’re all in this, up to our necks. 🙂
Thank you!
Love this shift in perspective , , , , just saying, thank you, Claudia
♥ thank you!
good for me
!
This is something you *would* want to tell high school and college students who have writing assignments for any class – writing isn’t just ‘one-and-done’ and stream-of-consciousness writing doesn’t work for people not named Jack Kerouac. Get it on paper first, then get it right.
Absolutely! (It didn’t work for Jack Kerouac either. He revised for four years after that first draft.)
Is that so!? Those literature snobs were trying to put one over on me just because I’m a scientist! I am going to start insulting them for their tastes…
He had been thinking about the book for several years, wrote a draft out in three weeks in April of 1951, and then revised many times before it was eventually published in 1957. The first draft, according to his editors, was unpublishable.
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