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In Appreciation of Bad Writing
(an excerpt from Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive) by
I often get asked (privately) by members of my writing workshop, “How can you always find something positive to say about every submission?” Sometimes I suspect that they think I am a Pollyanna or just faking my enthusiasm, but the truth is, I really do get excited about every story, with or without narrative occasion. My workshop has only one pre-requisite. You have to want to write fiction. Given this open-door policy, we have seen writers who struggle to eke out a two-page submission alongside writers who gush on and on for an eternity. We have seen short stories without any story, endings that ought to be beginnings, and flashbacks piled on flashbacks. We have waded through deep purple prose, dodged countless eyes roaming around the room, and tried to envision a character who looks just like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn (at the same time). If adverbs alone were currency, some of the writing in my workshop could save Social Security. It’s not that I don’t recognize all this bad writing when I read it. But part of the reason it doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm is because I don’t see bad writing as bad. I see it as part of the creative process. In fact, I think it is pretty safe to say that if it wasn’t for bad writing, there wouldn’t be much good writing, because literature doesn’t just burst forth fully armed like Athena from Zeus’s head. As writers, we are the accumulation of all the writing we have done in our lives. We learn from writing things that work, and we learn just as much from writing things that don’t work. So in this sense, even bad writing is good. Yet, most of us tend to forget this, especially when we are providing feedback. We look at a writer’s murky, messy draft and make snap judgments about her abilities, and think snooty comments—Why did she even bother to submit something so bad? We see bad writing as a strike against the writer, and a waste of our reading time as feedback providers, when in fact it is exactly the opposite. Bad writing is what germinates good writing. As feedback providers and writers, we need to remember that it is from four-hundred pages of “bad” writing that the best two-hundred-page books emerge.
A while back two new participants joined my workshop at the same time. One had wanted to write fiction forever, but even though she was bold enough to serve as chair of her community’s school board, she couldn’t muster the courage to give creative writing a try. Then she turned forty and realized that she was even more afraid of going through her whole life without trying to write stories because that wasn’t the kind of person she wanted to be. The other new participant came to the workshop with an MFA and had written a novel way back when that didn’t get published (not enough plot, apparently). So he took a respectable job, got married, had kids, and didn’t write another word of fiction for fifteen years, until a mutual friend gently bullied him into taking my class. When the workshop started, the chair of the school board signed up to be our first submitter just so she wouldn’t chicken out. And the MFA fellow with the respectable job set himself a goal of two thousand words a week. Do you think when I read her first four pages full of honest emotion that I saw her sporadic point-of-view shifts as reason for discouragement? Do you think when I read the opening chapters of his long-delayed second novel that his occasional authorial intrusions really mattered in writing that hinted at phenomenal talent? Just look at what these two people had already achieved! They were writing! They were writing! They were on their way! What’s not to appreciate, except a blank page? But seeing someone try fiction writing for the first time, or come back to it after a defeat aren’t the only reasons I appreciate all the writing in my workshop. Let me tell you about my “regulars.” Some of these writers have been in the writing workshop off and on for over ten years, before I had children and crow’s feet, and when I had even less insight into the publishing business than I do now. After all these years together, my regulars know all about my tendency to over-edit, my narrative pet peeves, and my pet peeves in general. And I know all about this one’s bad habit of run-on sentences, and that one’s difficultly fictionalizing her childhood, and how this fellow writes beautifully but struggles with recurring bouts of self doubt. I credit my regulars for helping me truly understand the creative process. Draft after draft, story after story, year after year, they have shown me how you have to start somewhere or you will never start, how order emerges from chaos, and how powerful stories come from humble beginnings. Just a few weeks ago, we critiqued one of the last chapters of a novel that actually started from a fifteen-minute, in-class writing exercise we did in the workshop about two years ago. Witnessing this writer’s progress every step of the way—the trials and errors as she developed her characters and discovered her plot and revised or tweaked everything from the structure to the dialogue tags—taught me as much about writing as a hundred books on craft. Now the novel is almost complete and shows such promise it recently earned the writer a generous grant from a writing foundation. I love this privilege I have been given through the workshop, of seeing stories and novels in the making. I love this opportunity I have every Thursday evening to talk about the craft of fiction writing, and then to see our discussions put into practice. And I love every writer in my workshop. Even if I don't love them in real life, I love them for those forty or so minutes when their stories are being discussed. Here they are, taking emotional risks and exposing their work to criticism when they could be home safe, reading a good book. They have entrusted me and the other members of the workshop to read their bad writing in the hopes we can help them make it better. This isn’t just an act of courage, but generosity. Writers need to see other writers in the thick of it. We need to see the creative process at work. Otherwise—just like the school board chair who was afraid to try fiction writing—we too could find ourselves avoiding the blank page for fear that what might come out is bad writing! We could find ourselves feeling discouraged about our own disastrous drafts to the point of quitting. When I feel this way (about once a day), I remember all the bad writing in my workshop and it cheers me up. Not because these writers failed, but because, ultimately, they succeeded. And if they can succeed by persevering then maybe, just maybe, so can I. And so I keep writing. In exchange for the writer’s generosity, feedback providers need to make a point to put bad writing in perspective. Bad writing is what it is—here today, likely gone in another few drafts, and likely to return at the start of a new story or chapter. By acknowledging—even appreciating—the role of bad writing in the creative process, we can stop using it as a judgment against the writer, or treating it as the eight-hundred-pound elephant in the room that everyone sees, but no one dares to mention. And once you put bad writing in perspective, it is easy to see past the problems in any piece of writing to its potential.
In a previous chapter, I mentioned that my writing workshop meets in a back room of my house that my family seldom uses. Sometimes when I am home alone, struggling in the midst of my own bad writing, I will wander back to that room in the quiet of mid-week, and there is our haphazard circle of vacant, green plastic chairs, and the stain on the pink rug where my dog had a long-ago accident, and a column of dust particles illuminated in a sunbeam. I see all of these imperfections, but I also see so much more. This room is alive with twelve years worth of characters telling their stories. I see a fisherman's wife who left her husband after he gambled away their life savings; and a fiddle-playing Houston detective who solved a grisly crime; and a zombie who just wanted to be loved. I see a Vietnam veteran who found peace in the classroom, and bug-like aliens that took over the earth, and a soccer mom who learned to appreciate the daily routines of her ordinary existence. I see an engineer at Los Alamos who rewrote history by stopping the development of the A-Bomb, and an old time logger who searched a lifetime for a mythical tree, and a little girl rolling back and forth against the wall outside her parent’s bedroom, as she waited for her cancer-stricken mother to die. This is what comes from bad writing. This is potential fulfilled, scenes that transport me, writing so good I feel humbled to know the writer, finished stories and novels rich in life, drama, entertainment, and meaning. And I was there! I got to witness their creation and watch them develop from nothing to really something. Somebody asks, “How can you always find something good to say about every submission?” My answer—“How can you not? Just step into my back room and see what I see.”
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