For many years now I have encouraged my students - whether they be Primary or Secondary school kids in a writing workshop, or adults serious enough about the writer's trade to have enrolled in a Professional Writing course - to write "crap".
“Don't try to write well,” I insist. “Just write the first thing that comes into your head.”
I claim no originality for this. It's a technique popularized by the English educator Peter Elbow in the writing strategy he termed “Free writing”.
It's a piece of advice that stems directly from the ground breaking work of Henrietta Klauser, in her book "Writing from Both Sides of the Brain".
In the fifties and sixties, the orthodoxy in the teaching of writing focussed on the need for careful pre-planning, and for a self-consciously censorial/ editorial approach to the writing process: “Plan what you are going to write carefully before you put pen to paper. Don't write until you've formulated your ideas precisely in your head.”
The “policeman”/editor at the gates of consciousness - the critical, judgmental, organised and logical Left brain - is only too ready to fulfill this role. As a consequence, a large proportion of children taught by this approach were paralysed by the thought of having to commit their ideas to paper. Nothing they thought of, it seemed to them, was going to be good enough.
What Klauser argued, persuasively, was that writing needs to harness both sides of the brain - the unpredictable, visual, creative, unfettered Right brain, and the ordered, critical left brain. Utilise each part of the brain in turn; let the ideas flow freely, argued Klauser. Put the policeman to sleep; send the critic away for a time, and let Ariel - the free spirit of creativity - loose.
The source of Elbow's "Free writing" is clear, and it has become part of teaching orthodoxy in primary and secondary schools, and in tertiary writing courses. Pour the words out onto the page; don't worry about "surface" features like spelling and punctuation; just get your ideas down; there time later to refine and redraft and focus on getting everything right.
This key idea underlies Julia Cameron's "Morning pages" - which she discusses in the influential “The Artist's Way.' Like Elbow's free writing, Cameron's Morning Pages are a way of getting into the flow of writing - tapping the ideas and experiences and "material" that the writer unconsciously wants to access. Faced with the blank page each morning, you simply write - starting with where you are at that moment - geographically, physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually …
The faith is that through writing you will find what you want to say.
So, in workshops and in classes, I encourage young and not-so-young writers to “let the words flow… write whatever comes into your head … write crap.” I have faith that they, like other writers - including myself - will write their way into insight; that through puddling around, putting ideas down, they will in time begin to discover some gold in the mullock, or that they will find seeds - anecdotes, phrases, whole paragraphs even - that they will be able to develop and refine later into stories or poems or articles.
Recently, though, I've begun to toy with what may be an extension of that idea. The free writing approach assumes that much that emerges from "the top of the head" will be fairly ordinary stuff; that it may well be vaguely and poorly expressed. "Crap" in this setting is an unintended outcome, a result - unavoidably - of the admonition to write quickly and freely and without editorial constaints.
As I've suggested , though, I've recently tried a variation on this theme. I've asked students to deliberately write badly; to consciously produce work that is cliché ridden, badly formulated, disorganized, poorly expressed; to produce pieces of work that break all the rules. In this approach, the "crap" is produced very deliberately.
It is a little like the now annual Bulwer/Lytton Bad Writing contest. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was a nineteenth century novelist who produced paragraphs like the following, the opening paragraph of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
So, if you ever needed a justification for producing poor writing, there it is: Write crap. Write really badly. Or perhaps, write real badly. Or even - write real bad. Like, write anything that tumbleslumps into your headlights blaring. Any worm of an idea that metaphormulates itself in your mindovermatter. Be open wide-eyed enough to commit it to the page and coat tails of your zealous overwriting. Hush, I hear the thunder of a braying donkey hee-hawing into eternity, through the blank mud-in-your-eye blindness of the beast of dirkness, the monstrous of dorkiness, inherent and unheard of in the anals of our world view.
Give it a try. Who knows what might emerge?
