For a couple years now, I’ve been having a sort of crisis about my ability as a writer, and it’s made me extremely self-conscious about my writing style. What was once a fun process of spinning ideas into words turned into an anxious mess of edits, re-edits, and deep doubts that I was writing anything worth reading, let alone anything good. I’ve become painfully aware of my overblown vocabulary, overuse of commas and semicolons, and a general pretentiousness in how everything seems to come out. Every sentence I would write would fall into a cycle of getting deleted, rewritten, and re-deleted until I would either just keep the words I hated or just give up altogether. Frankly, I’ve been in down bad, bruh.
My first time taking Advanced Exposition exposed me to Anne Lamott’s essay, “Shitty First Drafts.” Across two and a half pages, she explained that the purpose of writing a draft is to just get down ideas, whatever they are and however they come out. If it’s a whole bunch of run-on sentences that sound more like a therapy session than an essay, it’s okay. If an entire paragraph is nothing but swear words, it’s fine. If you write “pee pee doo doo fart in a butt” while stating your thesis, it’s totally cool. By getting down anything at all, even if you’re positive that none of it is usable or even salvageable, you give yourself the raw marble needed to sculpt into the essay or story hidden inside. But when you stop yourself by holding out for the right sentence or the correct idea, you give yourself no room to explore; no marble to chisel. You can’t edit nothing.
In short: “It’s okay to write garbage.”
As embarrassing as it is to say it, that idea changed my whole view on writing. I’ve started to trust myself more as a writer. I’ve started to have faith that even the total bullshit that I end up with has, by God, something worth using. I’ve given myself the freedom to write badly, and that freedom has begun to change my very thoughts as I write.
In a sense, Ballenger and Reid suggest the same idea for research and publishing. Ballenger’s exercises and brainstorming methods, at their core, ask the student to simply trust in his thoughts, wherever they go. Even if the majority are dead-ends, or half-thoughts, or just goddamn stupid, the very act of releasing yourself to pursue them all reveals new possibilities and even new revelations in yourself that can turn you on to something you never knew could turn anyone on. Reid’s suggestion for students to blog stems from the underlying assumption that to get better at something, you ought to just do it. By creating a space where the student doesn’t confine themselves to word counts, essay structures, or even consistent publishing dates, he believes that the student can come to enjoy the act of writing, giving them more writing man-hours and leading them a few steps closer toward mastery of the craft. Or, if not mastery, at least something more than nothing.
After all, nothing from nothing leaves nothing.