Hi Bootcampers
I am currently working on a new template for Boot Camp which will incorporate new material and topics.
In the near future, my writing posts will appear as a weekly dive into the archive on Thursdays, freed from behind the paywall.
For the time being, this week please accept a free offering of a Writing Post from 2022, ‘Writing Rubbish Is Fine’.
Writing Rubbish Is Fine
If you’re a typical writer you will sometimes look at what you’ve written and think to yourself ‘ well - this is complete crap that no-one will ever want to read and it’s an embarrassment that I ever thought I could do this in the first place’.
I have the same experience. Every time I write a book. The prose is wooden, the characters are unconvincing, the dialogue flops onto the page like a dead fish on a marble floor.
‘It’s complete crap’ is one of the many excuses writers use to give up ( along with ‘I don’t have the time’ or ‘I’ll never get published’ or ‘my keyboard keeps glitching’)
I’m not saying that what you’ve written isn’t crap.
It might well be.
( Although it’s less likely to be crap than the work of someone who is convinced that their writing is wonderful ).
What I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter.
Not at first anyway.
I believe in going forward, keeping momentum - however horrible what you’ve written is so far.
The thing is, you can only learn how to write by writing. And that involves making mistakes.
Lots of them.
There’s no doubt about it - writing is re-writing.
Yes - I have come across authors who try and produce perfectly formed sentences and vibrant characters as they write. When they finish a first draft, they think they’ve written their novel, pretty much. One, or at the most two more light drafts will complete the process.
That’s not how most authors work. Certainly not me. I just hammer away and hope for the best, and worry about how I might make it good later. My philosophy is, ‘at the end of this process I will have a novel.’
It will be a bad novel, probably a terrible novel. But I can go back and fix that. And having written an awful novel is a lot better than having not written a novel at all.
When I was lecturing at Guardian Masterclasses once, a woman came up to me and said ‘ I’ve got a great idea for a novel. But I’m scared to start writing it’.
I asked her what she was scared of and she replied ‘ I don’t know’.
But I knew.
I told her, “You’re scared of starting to write because there will only be two outcomes once you’ve started. Either you’ll give up sooner or later, and your dream of one day writing a novel will collapse. Or you won’t. And in some ways that’s even worse, because then you have to write the damn novel.”
So what I’m saying is, you have to be self-forgiving if you are going to write a novel. You have to write in the dark, not knowing where you are going.
You have to combine this extreme self-forgiveness with extreme self-criticism.
But not until later. Once you’ve got momentum. Once you’ve dredged some raw material to work with.
Here’s one of my favourite takes on writing a first draft by the author Rupert Thomson
For me, writing begins as a foray into what’s totally unknown. I write completely intuitive, flat-out first drafts with no research and no control. I try to write my way into some kind of psychological truth; I’m picking up something without knowing quite what I’m picking up, in the confidence that I’ll learn something new by the time I’ve done 10 drafts. I give myself absolute freedom the first time around: freedom to fail, freedom to wander, freedom to not know what I’m doing. I just have to get to the end, whatever end it is, knowing it may change.
This is what you do when you write a first draft—you write into your own apparent ignorance. Someone said to W. H. Auden, “Is it true that you can only write what you know? And he said, “Yes, but you can only know what you know once you’ve written it.” To me, a first draft feels like a journey in two directions. On the one hand, it’s like driving along a motorway at night with no headlights: you can crash, you take wrong turns, it’s dangerous, you don’t know where you’re going to end up. At the same time, it’s like going down a mineshaft into yourself, as deep as you possibly can. Those things—covering ground and diving deeper—seem to happen simultaneously when you write a first draft.
It’s a frightening process—I seem to go through a place with every book where I wonder if I’ve wasted all my time, if the idea is totally flawed, and I’ll never bring it off. But the same way that “love entertains its own discriminations,” creativity does, too: You have to trust your instinct and your intuition. If you don’t, then every decision that you ever make is going to have to be rational. That’s impossible. Every page of a book has a million decisions on it, so if you don’t trust your intuition, you’re lost, you’re hamstrung.
So What Now?
Once you’ve written your novel and made it the best you can, after numerous drafts, which will largely consist of getting rid of the rubbish you wrote in your first draft - what are you meant to do then? How do you know if you’re writing is any good?
This is always a big problem.
You can show it to your friends and family, but they will lie to you.
Of course they will lie to you.
They are not going to lose a friend by telling them that they hate your novel or sour a family relationship in perpetuity.
You can also show it to a writing group/community that you might belong to.
They will also lie to you - because they see their role as encouragement , not deflation.
Or they will give you honest criticism - that is wrong and takes you in the wrong direction.
Because reading a text is a highly skilled process that it takes years to acquire the ability to do correctly.
So what other possibilities are there?
You can send it to an agent or publishing house, but they are not going to spend time telling you what’s right and what’s wrong with your novel. In most cases, it will just go in the bin if they don’t like it enough to publish it. And that’s 99 per cent of the time. At least.
You can also send it to one of the many manuscript assessment services out there. But they are of variable quality. And they also have much more incentive to flatter you than tell you the truth.
You can send to me at timlott.com I will tell you the truth - but I’m not particularly cheap compared with most of the agencies.
Or you can find a professional editor from a publishing house to read it for you. Again - not cheap. But better, probably, than a reading agency.
On top of that, all of us - the professional editor, the Ms assessment service, me - will be wrong, to some extent. Obviously writing is partly a matter of taste.
But there is also a strong objective element. Is the story convincing? Are the characters well rounded? Is the dialogue believable? Is the plot a recognisable shape? These matters can be properly assessed just as you might assess how well a house is constructed.
So getting advice is definitely worth it, before you send out to a publisher. But make sure it’s the right advisor, or you are throwing money down the drain as well as your many hours of hard work.
At Ease!
Excellent good sense. And, as Helen says, enormously encouraging. Thanks Tim.
I loved this. It was enormously encouraging. And yes - “This is what you do when you write a first draft—you write into your own apparent ignorance.”