Writing Badly

They tell you to write every day, no matter what. They tell you to revise endlessly, to omit needless words and to trim your work down; correct your grammar, close your plot holes. What they are actually telling you is that much of what you write will be total trash.

It’s just mathematics. A certain (large) percentage of what you create is junk. No one sits down and just churns out reams of gold plated words. If anything, the greater quantity of words you produce on a daily basis, the percentage of bad writing rises until, like someone in a Mills and Boon Romance Factory, you’re frantically slamming out a novel per week which consists of one hundred percent shit.

Here’s the thing: up to a point, it’s not only okay to write badly, it’s necessary, and next time you sit down to write you’d do well to remember that. If, that is, you are in the habit of editing more than once or twice. If not, then you’re better off writing no more than one or two hundred words a day and making sure they’re exactly the right ones in the right places, but minimal editing is generally a bad idea; there are some things you just don’t see in first draft.

Even the top writers at the top of their game occasionally drop something so bad it makes their own fans shake their heads in wonderment. What the hell was he thinking? I’ll tell you what – he’s reading the same book you are and shaking his head for the same reasons. He’s muttering to himself: ‘Damn, what the hell was I thinking?’

For example: ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.’ That’s a hell of a percentage. Whoever said that has to write ninety two books before they have a decent one, or revise the same book ninety two times. Who said that, you wonder, Stephanie Meyer? Nope, Hemingway.

So accept that you will write badly, and often, if you’re a beginner. In fact, I have a suspicion that I may be writing badly this very moment. That’s alright though, because I plan to edit this a few times. But the point of the post is to explain why this truth is a blessing in disguise, and that you should stop beating yourself up about it and in fact acknowledge it as a necessary part of the process.

Here are all the ways writing badly has helped me.

Lately I’ve been making a lot of false starts. I don’t like false starts. Once I’ve begun, that should be it, goddammit. There is nothing more irritating than writing five thousand words of what will probably be a seven thousand word short story and then realising that it sucks so bad you have to start again. But it happens to me all the time, and it will continue to happen. As much as I dislike it, however, I need to do it. Why? Because false starts help.

To toot my own horn, one of my recent stories, Fear, went down extremely well with my beta readers. One said it was the best thing I’d ever written, and another said it was the scariest (same thing). I was happy with it too, especially since it took me three and a half false starts before I got going. The first one, I wrote four thousand words before I deleted everything. The half is because the fourth time I did that, I just changed the title (it was originally called Pool. I know, right? Three rewrites and the very first word still sucks.)

But here’s the kicker: important things happened during those rewrites. In the first one, one of the characters tells some freaky stories in detail to the protagonist. The existence of those stories was necessary, but the thousand words detailing them was not. In the end, I allude to the stories only in a couple of vague sentences, and the effect was much stronger. In the second rewrite, I found myself overly describing both characters: who they were, what they looked like, etc. In the final draft, I don’t spend that much time on their daily lives, thoughts or appearances. But I needed that failed draft, because I had to know those things. Each time I got a better picture of what was going on, what I needed to say and what I could leave out, and when I finally got going, a lot of it was fixed in my mind.

There are many things that require a restart: you’re writing from the wrong point of view, you’ve started in the wrong place or time, your characters are badly thought out, etc. The trick about writing badly is a simple but difficult rule: know when to fold ‘em, folks. Sometimes I write a story which I think is great, and after I’ve sent it to everyone I know I start to get a sour feeling in my stomach, and a week later, even if no one’s said a word, I know it was bad. Other times, I think it’s awful initially, and everyone raves about it. If you can catch the rotten things before they escape into the world, you’re doing well.

Extensive editing is one way to do this, but it doesn’t always work. I do find, though, that I’m more likely to be so disgusted by something I’ve done during the editing phase that I won’t let it see the light of day, and that’s probably for the good. Once I wrote a six thousand word short story, spent a week thinking about it, and then deleted the whole thing without so much as a second glance. To return to the poker analogy, it’s like learning not to cling to your flush draw when all the signs are telling you to fold and cut your losses. And like I said, even the pros get it wrong now and again – didn’t Stephen King throw the first fifty pages of his breakout novel Carrie in the bin?

The best way I’ve found to make the decision to cut your losses is to get out of it with something good. Look hard at the bad things you write, and ask yourself ‘what did I do right?’ Then when you start the rewrite, you’ll be able to home in on that one thing and bring it to the foreground.

You must accept your propensity to spill offal onto a page. This will eliminate the fear of daily writing. When I used to be more erratic, I would excuse myself from writing on a given day because I was tired, or sick, or at a loss for ideas, knowing that whatever I created would probably be sub-par. Once I accepted that sub-par was going to happen and I could always improve it later, I was able to write day in, day out, just like the pros. The fear of failure was gone, and ultimately, I’ve had a lot of good days at the keyboard which I thought were going to be terrible.

Failure in general, while unpleasant, is a learning curve, just as natural as a child skinning his knees learning to ride a bike. It stings like hell, but if you don’t fall you won’t get anywhere. The real crime is not learning.

Finally, we have my favourite mining analogy. If you mine for gold, you must excavate large quantities of worthless mud. It would be nice if you could just reach down and pick it up off the ground, but the good stuff is buried way down there, and if you have to dig through an acre of putrefied faeces, you will, because it’s worth it. In writing, sometimes you’ll do a scene or have an idea or even make just a sentence, and it will be excellent and at the core of what you wanted – and you will realise that you couldn’t have got there if you hadn’t first written a bunch of other bullshit.

So next time you start something and find you have to delete it over and over, or you’re hesitant to start your daily one thousand, just remember that it is okay for you to do a bad day’s work. Try to catch it before it gets out though, because you should also remember that the same guy who wrote The Old Man and the Sea also wrote The Green Hills of Africa, and the same guy who wrote The Shining also wrote Maximum Overdrive.