Writing on Writing: Silencing Your Inner Bastard
Last week’s assignment was to write something awful. Not merely bad, mind you. I’m talking truly horrid. In case you’ve spent the last week fretting over the point of that little exercise (I know you weren’t; play along for a bit), here’s why I put it out there:
Anyone that takes writing even remotely seriously wants to do it well. And anyone–at least of the writers I know–that wants to do it well is convinced that their writing is pretty awful. Now, I’ll grant you that there are some pretty bad writers out there. But if you tried this exercise, you probably found that it took some effort to come up with something bad.
Keep that in mind the next time you get to feeling down over your writing. Mind you, I’m not saying that everything you write will be first-draft-perfect. What I am saying, though, is that most writing doesn’t have anything wrong with it that another draft wouldn’t cure. Paper comes in those big packages for a reason, y’know. Not for nothing did E.B. White observe that the best writing is rewriting.
This brings us to your inner critic. That little voice can be useful, as long as he or she knows when to shut up. There’s something useful in always wanting to write better, in wanting to improve your craft. That voice stops being useful, though, when it tells you that it’s never good enough. Sooner or later, you’ve got to let the piece on which you’re working go, and move onto something else. You can always revisit it later… and when you do, you might be surprised to find that it’s a lot better than you thought it was when you first wrote it.
This week’s assignment: Whether you’ve written for years, or you’re just starting out, chances are you see yourself as a certain kind of writer. You do poetry, or fiction, or essays, and you may not have given much thought to writing anything else. So try on a different genre. If you write about food, try a piece on birdwatching (and no cheating; it’s no fair including an aside about roasted finch, or pigeon carbonara); if your beat is poetry, try something on politics.
More next week. Keep your pencils, and your mind, sharp.
Tags: essays, exercises, writing, writing prompts