“You’ve got to give yourselves permission to suck,” I tell them as I pace between the rows. This could be any of my writing classrooms—composition or creative writing. “If you can’t yet do that,” I pause and glance around, lock eyes with my perfectionists (I can always tell who they are during this talk), and say, “then take my permission. You have your writing professor’s permission to write terribly.”
Anne Lamott’s iconic “Shitty First Drafts” shines down from the projector to reassure them that this works. Her words include “no one is going to see it,” so it can be written without restraint, without judgment. I stop here and turn, pace a new direction. “But is that true?” I scan the room to see who is following. “Are you writing without judgment just because no one will see it?” And some heads nod yes. Maybe they already trust. But some of my others—maybe those same perfectionists—they have a different expression. I say, “do you ever find yourself typing, typing, typing and then furiously deleting everything while you mutter under your breath about how stupid it all sounds?” These folks nod.
“So she’s telling us the easy, part, right? She’s telling us, ‘just write the shitty draft and don’t slow yourself down by judging it,’ yeah?” They nod along. “But how do we actually do that? How do you stop reading what you’ve written back to yourself and deciding to just delete it all, to just let the Writer’s Block cuddle up next to you?” Now the room is silent and they stare at me. Some of them even have tilted heads. I shrug and give them a weak smile. “I wish I had a simple answer for you. The reality is that you have to discover your own process. But you do have to discover your process, whatever it is. Trust me, I used to fight the necessity of process. I was sure just revising as I drafted worked fine. And I spent a lot of miserable nights stuck at the top of a page, unable to keep anything I typed.” More nods. Many know this experience.
“So I decided, just for once, I’d type without deleting for just 20 minutes. I even set a timer. That way, if it didn’t work, I’d only be out 20 minutes—a lousy sitcom episode’s worth of time, minus commercials. And you know what? The first few lines I typed were awful. Sheer drek. For 10 minutes. And my inner critic was cracking jokes left and right. But by around minute 17, things were getting interesting and that critic didn’t have so much to say. When the 20 minute noise sounded, I had some ideas on the page I hadn’t previously known I wanted to mess around with. So I took one of those ideas and slapped it at the top of a new page. I set my timer again. And the words came even easier this time. Then I realized I needed a brain break, so I played some Tetris. But I had a real project started at that point—a THING was taking shape where there had been NOTHING previously—that’s a great feeling, you know?”
Some of them nod—they do know. Others look intrigued—hopefully they soon will know. By this point, I’m moving back to the front of the room. I pick up a stopwatch. “Get your journals. You’re going to write. Just for 10 minutes this time. Then we’ll watch 5 minutes of funny animal videos. Then we’ll repeat. Then you’ll go home with SOMETHING where there was NOTHING in your journals.” And they do. For ten years now, I’ve watched them leave with expressions that are one part baffled, one part impressed with themselves, and one part hopeful that this whole writing thing can happen for them.
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Ki Russell teaches writing, literature, and creative writing at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon. She is the author of Antler Woman Responds (Paladin), The Wolf at the Door (Ars Omnia), and How to Become Baba Yaga (Medulla). She also serves as poetry co-editor for Phantom Drift, a Journal of New Fabulism. Ki researches fairy tales then butchers them for her own purposes. She steals time from grading to wrestle with words, converse with cats, dance with the dog, and paint.