Writing Badly

It’s good to write bad sometimes. It doesn’t seem good while you’re doing it. Annoying. Frightening. Irritating. Discouraging. It seems more along the lines of these words. It FEELS more like that. You want to be better. You want to write beautiful prose with depth and meaning and you want your characters to feel right and all that.

Sometimes you can’t.

In fact, in early drafts, you can’t a lot. You have to write badly in order to get to the good stuff. For me, I’m finding my way in early drafts and I have to accept the imprecision of language and plot and character. If I don’t accept these things, then I have to stop writing.

I don’t want to do that.

I write nearly every day because I love it and because I believe that’s how you keep the momentum of a manuscript. So I take the good with the bad and hope that in revision I can turn most of that bad into good.