You Can't Write Badly Even When You Try--for Ruth Who Had to Work

I did this thing in class last night where I read the following quote from Keep Going by Austin Kleon. He was quoting something the artist Sol LeWitt had said to the artist Eva Hesse: “You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO…Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—do DO IT.”

I asked the participants in my class to describe their surroundings using this “bad” method. When they read their work out loud, it was clear that BAD writing was associated with short, declarative sentences, “simple” topics (laughter rather than the State of the Union), and a sense of looseness, like their inner critic hadn’t had a stranglehold around their necks while they wrote.

The pieces were lovely.

So I tried again to see if, this time, they could actually write badly. I asked them to write about a friend with whom they were no longer friends. This time I gave them ten minutes, I think, instead of five or six. I figured maybe more time would allow them to be more bad.

Nope. The writing, to a person, only got better. Even cleaner, more pleasurable to hear, more fun.

I tried a third time, asking people to take ten minutes again, only this time to write about a memory they’d never written about before.

You know when someone reads to you and it’s like cool water running over the palms of your hands, or warm water running over your body if you like that kind of thing better? You know when someone reads their work to you and suddenly it’s your birthday, present after present placed in your lap?

Class was like that.

I think for some people, maybe everyone in my class, writing badly means sounding like yourself. It means saying what you think instead of putting your words through the committee of all those assholes in your head. Or the one asshole who thinks they know better than you do what is good and right and true and safe to say.

I told the class I imagined they had a sun where their heart was, stars in their abdomen, and that their writing was coming from these places: from the universal enormity in which we exist. Where anything can happen. Where a bird flies by, and you can hear the wings stir the air, and you remember how lucky you are to be alive. I told the class I imagined they had an ax murderer in their head who tried to destroy their freedom and voice by telling them what they should and should not write or say.

What if the first day of English class in junior high, instead of teaching about adverbs, the teacher showed the students how to take a deep breath and relax before they began to write? What if the teacher/school cared more about what the students had to say than whether they had said it according to some model?

When I taught writing at the girl’s juvenile hall, the girls were not allowed to write swears. I thought that was so stupid. For many of them, swearing was home. Why not let them go there and bring it back to us so we can see, so we can understand, so we can really hear?

It can be hard to grade or determine if something’s good or bad if it is purely what it is. You want to grade a worm? A flower? Pluto?

Why?