Writing ugly 31/1/2020
What do you think of my new phrase – writing ugly?
A few weeks ago I got an email from one of my current mentees, Keri.
“I guess my biggest fear is that the book just keeps dragging on and I’ll never finish it unless I give myself some targets,” she wrote. “ I want to embrace the writing ‘ugly’ concept we talked about.”
Like we talked about? Did we? Did I come up with that fab phrase? Sometimes I surprise even myself with my word acrobatics. I basked in the glow for a few moments, but deep down I knew this was not my phrase. It was not my phrase but I wanted it. Badly.
Ever since I found the wonderful Anne Lamott’s phrase the Shitty First Draft in her book, Bird by Bird, it has helped me and my students out of many a sticky situation. I love it and use it so much that folk now know it by the acronym SFD.
I can credit the Shitty First Draft as the reason I manage to write quite so much. 32 books and counting and still the irresistible ideas keep coming, usually in the middle of the night. I write this newsletter, I write poems, I write a journal and I write blogs and articles and every single time I stand by the SFD. I love it because, like with a belch, it’s ‘better out than in’. I know I’ll feel better about myself if I have written something, however badly, and reached the end. The thoughts and ideas have been set free of the bustling city that inhabits my mind and are on the page.
I love the SFD. I need the SFD and yet writing ugly has me in its thrall. Writing ugly seems to take the SFD a step further; it’s as if it wants me to write badlyon purpose. And, as I lay there, wide awake, one evening around midnight last week, I realized the power of this new phrase.
You see…
Writing ugly is about writing a scrappy, illegible table of contents for that book on a piece of paper you tear from the back of a book.
Writing ugly is about setting the timer for ten minutes and making yourself write with no particular direction in mind, again longhand, just to see where the words take you.
Writing ugly is about chucking random phrases down, one on each line and calling the result a poem on short lines, like novelist Catherine Cookson did.
Writing ugly is about ‘putting your pen on the paper and just going’, as Natalie Goldberg instructs in her seminal book on speedwriting, Writing Down the Bones.
Writing ugly is about sending your sabotaging inner perfectionist on a long hike.
Because, you see, the fundamental difference between the Shitty First Draft and writing ugly is that there is no sense even of ‘draft’ in the new phrase. And without the pressure of the knowledge that what you put down has to ultimately be useable, you can let rip. What does it matter if what you throw at the page never actually turns into a draft of something?
I had to thrash it out with Keri.
“Is that my phrase or yours?” I asked her. “Because I think I want to adopt it.”
“I think it’s mine, actually,” she wrote. “But you came up with the title for my book and so you can keep it. By the way, I plan to write ugly from 1 Feb – 30 April to really make some progress. I realise, after the ugly writing there will still need a whole lot of re-writing/edits afterwards…”
Keri knew intuitively that writing ugly was akin to limbering up, flexing her writing muscles and simply getting words down on paper and out of her head and the ether. She knew that it was a preliminary stage and gave me the credit for an idea that was actually all hers.
So there it is. I have taken my new phrase for its first outing. What do you think? Will it catch on?
