Do you resist doing things badly?
I do. I strongly dislike the idea of producing low-quality work. (Can you tell I’m a recovering perfectionist?) I take all sorts of steps to avoid creating anything I might consider even remotely inaccurate, unaesthetic, tedious, or of an otherwise unhelpful quality. This approach, of course, can introduce its own kind of unhelpfulness. I know that I sometimes don’t give myself enough permission to experiment, practice, declare something “good enough,” or do things I fear might reflect poorly on my abilities or competence.
Can you resonate with any of this?
I’ve seen this in my writing. For years, I’ve had trouble completing rough drafts. I’ll reach a point early on in a piece where I want to revise, revise, and revise before I go any further. This has proved the biggest problem when I’ve tried writing fiction. I can’t count how many times I’ve begun writing chapters only to scrap the manuscript long before reaching a half-way point. As three chapters would turn into five or six, I’d have a nagging awareness that I’d eventually find insurmountable: the writing was bad.
I’d often recall one of my college professors who adored the concept of “vomit drafts.” A vomit draft meant writing that we students considered so bad and so incomplete that it didn’t even deserve the name of a “rough draft.” This professor believed that one of the most difficult phases of writing involved simply getting started and getting something – anything – onto a page. Once we got started, his theory said that we’d gather momentum. By taking one step, we could take another. Not only did he insist that we write vomit drafts. He required us to bring them to class and share them. I found it mortifying to share work of that quality.
I’m reflecting here on my writing, but the experience applies to so many other areas in life. Practicing a new sport, learning a foreign language, approaching a project from a different angle – the list goes on.
What do you resist doing badly?
Listening to an On Being podcast from earlier this year, I resonated deeply with Krista Tippett’s description of her writing process. “An experience I have had again and again that is very unsettling,” she says in her interview with music producer Rick Rubin, “is that when I’m . . . in those early stages . . . I have learned not to trust knowing what is good that I’ve written.” Tippet adds, “there’s this inability to judge . . . which is really unnerving.” In the interview, Rubin responds with advice. “Write as much as you can,” he says, “and don’t look back at it. Just write.”[1]
I’ve been questioning how it is that I finally finished and published my first novel last year. Was it because I finally kept writing? It could explain that accomplishment any number of ways. Perhaps I finished the novel because I finally had a work schedule that allowed me to claim adequate morning hours to write (my brain works a certain way in the morning that it doesn’t work any other time of day). Perhaps I finished the novel because I finally landed on a plot line that spoke to me. Perhaps I finished because somehow, in the mystery of the universe, the time was right. Perhaps.
No getting around it, though: my finally finishing a novel involved the experiment of suspending my normal goal of doing things well. Instead, I focused on simply completing the manuscript. I wrote dialogue and knew immediately that it sounded cheesy. I described experiences and felt convicted that I hadn’t captured what I’d meant. I finished a chapter and knew that I’d felt bored the entire time I was writing it. It felt completely counter-intuitive to leave all that alone and to keep writing, but I did it. My goal was simply to finish a draft, so I kept writing until I finished the manuscript draft, and then I set it aside.
Did the writing turn out to be good, after all, when I read it again later? No! I admit that I did find some good parts I hadn’t appreciated before. At the same time, I agreed with many of my earlier assessments. In so many ways, the writing was bad. It had a weak plot and flat characters, and I still felt bored reading it.
I started working on it again, though, and I approached the revision process as a sort of puzzle. What would make the characters seem more real and maybe even have some chemistry together? What would make the story more interesting for me, at least, to read? I had plenty of questions to work with. Because I finally had a vomit draft before me, I had material to work with, too.
The discovery still feels stunning: it actually had great value to me to produce something of low-quality. It gave me practice. It taught me things. It laid groundwork on which I could build. I had what I needed to keep trying.
Where does your own mind go as you think about the value of producing low-quality work? Could it help you to do something poorly sometime very soon?
[1] Krista Tippett, interview with Rick Rubin, “Magic, Everyday Mystery, and Getting Creative,” On Being with Krista Tippet, podcast audio, March 16, 2023, https://onbeing.org/programs/rick-rubin-magic-everyday-mystery-and-getting-creative/.
Callie J. Smith 
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