Journal /
Writing
Writing badly on purpose
The draft you are afraid to write is the one you need. A short case for terrible first pages, and a fifteen-minute exercise to get one done tonight.
Most people who want to write a novel already have the opening line. They have had it for years. What they do not have is page two, because page two has to be written badly before it can be written well, and that feels unbearable.
So here is my advice, which I give to every cohort on the first night: write badly on purpose. Not carelessly. On purpose.
The draft is for you
A first draft is not a performance. Nobody will read it but you, and possibly me. Its only job is to exist, so that you have something to change. You cannot edit an empty page, and you cannot discover your story while you are still guarding it.
When you give yourself permission to be bad, something odd happens: you get faster, and speed is where surprises live. Characters say things you did not plan. Scenes go somewhere else. That is your story telling you what it wants.
“Perfect sentences on page one are a way of never reaching page two.”
Fifteen minutes, tonight
Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Write the scene you are most nervous about, in the plainest words you can find. Do not reread. Do not fix spelling. If you get stuck, write what happens next in brackets and keep going.
A first page from a student’s draft, with every crossing-out left in.
When the timer goes, stop, even mid-sentence. Close the notebook. Tomorrow, read it once and underline the one line that surprised you. That line is where the next session starts.
There is a reason this works. The part of you that judges sentences is different from the part that invents them, and they are bad at sharing a room. When the judge is in charge, the inventor goes quiet. Writing quickly, with permission to be bad, sends the judge out for a walk. It will be back for the second draft, and you will need it then.
I also ask students to keep their bad pages, not throw them away. In week six we go back to them, and almost everyone finds something there they had forgotten: a line of dialogue, an image, a character who wandered in for one paragraph and deserves a whole chapter. The bad pages are a seed store. You only find out what is in them by planting.
None of this means craft does not matter. It matters enormously, later. Voice, structure and rhythm are what the course spends most of its weeks on. But you cannot revise a voice you have not let speak.
What changes after a few weeks
Students who do this every day for a month tell me the same thing: the blank page stops being frightening because it never stays blank for long. The writing does not get perfect. It gets alive, and alive is much easier to make good.
Write badly tonight. Fix it next month. The novel is on the other side of a lot of imperfect pages, and the only way there is through them.
Learn this properly
Write the novel you keep putting off
10 weeks
· £480
