This is the Year I Master Messy Writing

A resolution (of sorts!)

It’s that time of year again: resolution is in the air. Whether or not you bother to make them or believe they’re worth making, resolutions seem unavoidable in the days after Christmas. In the mass stagger forward into a new year, partied-out people, too exhausted to come up with better conversation starters, return to that old standby: Have you got any New Year’s resolutions?

I almost never have time or energy left to think of resolutions once the end of the year rolls around. This year, however, I had my resolution figured out well before I switched on the auto-reply for my work email account.

This will be the year I master messy writing.

Getting messy

‘Messy writing’ came up in the last conversation I had with my doctoral student before the winter break. Over the coming year, I explained, we were going to focus on ensuring that she had a complete ‘bad’ draft of her dissertation to work with. ‘By “bad” I mean that you have a draft that’s pretty much all in complete sentences and has a beginning, middle, and end, as well as an argument. But: it’s a draft where the wording isn’t fine-tuned, there’s still some massaging of ideas to do, and your footnotes don’t have all the necessary bibliographical info.’

Receiving no reply, I tried another formulation: ‘Basically, you have most of your main ideas down on paper in some sort of order, and it gives you material to work with, with some “breadcrumbs” in marginal comments so you know what questions still need answering, what words need changing, and where you want to go next.’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘So what you’re saying is I need to get good at messy writing.’

And I immediately decided that was the perfect term for what I was describing.

Can you get better at writing badly?

For anyone developing a skill or craft—whether it’s writing or art or cooking or anything else—the idea of an unfinished, disordered, unpolished work-in-progress is often an uncomfortable one. And yet almost anyone you meet will tell you that before you can get good at something, or make something good, you need to do it badly for awhile (or at least imperfectly).

One of the most famous proponents of this view, Malcolm Gladwell, has argued that at least 10,000 hours of practice are required to achieve mastery or expertise in a particular skill. A fan of the ‘10,000 hours theory’, Ed Sheeran has compared writing songs to turning on a dirty old tap:

When you switch the dirty tap on it’s going to flow shit water out for a substantial amount of time, [but] then clean water is going to start flowing.

When it comes to writing, probably the best known comparable theory is Anne Lamott’s ‘shitty first draft’ theory. In her famous book on writing Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott notes that the shitty first draft is a necessary stage in her own writing process:

For me, and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really really shitty first drafts.

For a long time now I’ve treated writing badly as a necessary stage in the process that—usually!—leads me to write better. If you ask me what my one writing tip is, I’d respond, ‘Get comfortable with writing badly, because you have to do a lot of it in order to write well.’ And when I had that conversation with my doctoral student, this was the basic lesson I was trying to impart.

As many of my Twitter followers know, I am a big fan of the Very Bad Draft. It’s something I aim for when I write, and it gives me a sense of achievement when I’ve completed it. Sure, it might be rubbish, and there might be some ridiculous sentences in there (I’m usually not afraid of sharing them on social media, if only to give myself and others a laugh). Having a complete, horrible draft feels much better to me than having a more polished fragmentary or partial draft.

But when my doctoral student noted that bad or ‘messy’ writing was something she needed to get good at, it occurred to me that maybe I’d been missing something. It was good that I’d gotten comfortable with the idea and process of writing badly. But I was still treating it as a stage in the writing process to be gotten through as quickly as possible. For me, bad writing was simply something I had to put up with, something I had to endure before I got to the good stuff. But what if there was another way to approach it?

What if I treated bad writing as a skill to be mastered?

My writing resolution

It wasn’t until that conversation with my doctoral student about messy writing that I realised there might be a better way to approach the Bad Writing Stage. Having gotten comfortable with the fact that the Bad Writing Stage is not only necessary, but almost always unavoidable, it was time for me to make that bad writing work harder for me.

• I’m going to keep using bad writing to generate material to work with. I’ll play around with setting ridiculous goals for myself: Can I sketch out a chunky chapter outline in an hour or less? Can I sketch out a plan for an entire book in one weekend? (Note: I actually tried this last approach during what I called my #BookBlast weekend—it worked!)

• I’m going to use bad writing to help refine my arguments. I usually find it takes me a long while to pinpoint what I want to say and how I want to say it. Can I speed that up by trying to come up with five different ways of stating my argument in five minutes?

• I’m going to try to find faster ways to push through the feelings that keep me from writing badly. Maybe I can get my bad writing going more quickly with some silly writing exercises (for example, by playing ‘How Badly Can I Say This’, or trying to shrink my entire thesis down to ten, six, or even three words).

• I’m going to make myself go through more rounds of bad writing. When I had to get a recent book project going, I started by pasting my chapter abstracts into separate documents. I then expanded those abstracts into 1-2,000-word sketches, which I later expanded into 4,000-word Very Bad Drafts, and only then did I let myself begin the process of rewriting. So I’m going to try that approach out elsewhere!

My hope is not only that I’ll get better at writing badly this year or that I’ll write better more quickly (though I definitely hope both these things!). What I really hope is that I’ll begin to enjoy bad writing by gamifying it and tailoring it in ways like these. And as we all take our next steps forward into 2023, I invite you to join me in my messy experiment!