Write It, Badly

A while ago I found myself stuck on a scene in a novel I'm working on. I’m somewhere in that spectrum between planner and pantser, so I had written an outline; but somehow my outlines rarely survive contact with my drafts. It’s like my characters get stage fright; they freeze in place until I can give them the right cues. But this time I couldn’t get them to budge.

I have a few strategies for when the wheels get stuck: rethinking the scene from scratch, changing up which characters are in the room, cutting the scene out entirely, etc. But I had recently encountered a piece of writing advice on Tumblr that seemed worth a try. “Let your story be bad for a day. Aggressively bad.”

I hoped writing a terrible draft would help me get past that unreasonable desire to write the scene perfectly the first time. Or at least serve as a placeholder so I could move on with the book and come back later. So, I decided to give it a try.

And it was horribly, horrendously, nail-bitingly, gloriously bad. Pure cringe. The characters spoke in punctuation marks and yelled about the subtext. There was more purple than prose. The dialogue tags oozed adverbs. The monsters lurking in the woods interrupted the heroes to lodge a formal complaint about the noise. It was the most unreadable thing I’ve written as a fully conscious adult.

So, what happened?

That badly written draft ended up being a better outline than my outline. Yes, it was ridiculous. But it also clarified what each character was thinking and gave me a chance to debug the scene on paper. The scene became so much easier to write; whatever had me stuck finally came loose. 

Sometimes when a scene sticks, there’s nothing wrong with the scene. It’s us that’s stuck in our own heads, or clinging to impossible perfectionism, or some other mental block. And sometimes, all it takes is removing a little pressure before you can get writing again. Or else finding a way to break free from expectations about what the scene should be.

The other takeaway I get from this experience is that sometimes I need to be patient with the process when my regular rough drafts come out “rougher” than I intended. There are days when I feel like everything I write is garbage. But if intentionally bad writing can be salvaged on the rewrite, then that’s true for everything else I write, too. 

So now when my stories hit a block, I’ve got one more tool I can fall back on. Write the story—as badly as I can. Get the words on the page. And if nothing else, at least I know my next draft will be a better one.