On writing badly

It’s easy to write when you don’t care about quality. I’m not saying that quality isn’t important — it is. I am saying that sometimes we, as writers, get hung up on quality to the point that we stop putting words on paper.

There’s a lot of freedom, and a lot of fun, in deciding to write badly on purpose.

This exercise comes in 2 parts. First, select a genre and write the worst possible scene in that genre. Use stereotypes, passive sentence structure, whatever. Just make it as bad as you possibly can.

The office door was walked through by a leggy dame. A red cocktail dress was worn by her. So attractive was she that I didn’t notice the snub-nosed .55 that was held by her until my face was pointed at by it.

For the second part of this exercise you need A) a character; and B) an unescapable situation.

You’ve written yourself into a hole and don’t know how to get out. Happens to all of us. If you currently have a character stuck in a story, use that. If not, use the first thing that comes to mind.

When advertising agencies get stuck for new ideas they’ll often brainstorm the worst possible ideas (“Listerine also works great for getting sleep seeds out of baby’s tender eyes.”). After several minutes of bad ideas they’ll start looking for good ideas again. Often something generated as a bad idea becomes a springboard to a good idea going forward.

Set a timer for 20 minutes and write your character out of their problem in as many truly bad ways as possible. Actually do the writing — get into the character’s voice, give setting details, let us see the process they use to escape their trap. Try not to spend more than 3 minutes on any single solution — remember these are BAD ideas, so don’t worry about making the writing good — just get through as many as you can before the timer goes off.

Above all, HAVE FUN.

In February, a couple of us (the Founders) got together to come up with guidelines for our group.

Dave Farland had sent out several emails last year about writing groups, so I went through those again and pulled out the good nuggets of information.

In any case, we set up some rules about how we’re going to run the thing and our expectations. Basically, we expect people to write something new every month instead of just rehashing the same old thing again and again. We also don’t want critiques to get out of hand and so will use something similar to Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp method (which I believe is also used at Odyssey and/or Clarion). Everyone will get a turn and there will not be any cross-talking or commenting by the author.

We also decided to include a short writing exercise at the beginning of each one so that we can improve our craft and get our brains working.

Finally, we decided (for various reasons that I will not enumerate at the present time) to call our group The Point Writing Group.

We are open to anyone who is serious about writing and improving themselves.

So, if you live in northern Utah county or southern Salt Lake county (in Utah, of course), then we’d be happy to have you.