“A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.” Don Roff

This morning I remembered my own advice to my students: Write badly. You’ve heard it before (famously, Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts), but have you ever tried? Really tried? Do your best to do your worst. Guess what? It’s tremendously freeing. All your fears faced. Maybe they’re realized in your clunky, cliched, boring, lifeless prose–but you see that you can fix the problems because you know what they are. And you didn’t die from writing badly–in fact, you wrote! A victory, always. And more surprising, there’s something in there that works, that is alive, maybe more alive because it snuck by the censor that dresses up as some kind of arbiter of taste but really is just too scared to write.

You can always write badly, and what’s most important is that you write. Daily. Freely. This is what you love. This is what matters to you.

Look, would you describe the first steps or awkward lolling gait of a toddler as “walking badly”? Can you imagine if kids waited until they knew everything about coordination, motor skills and motion before they began to try to walk? We learn in action. Your writing is only going to get better on the page. Write badly. It will turn you into a daily, fluid writer, and that will make you good. Nothing else will work. Try it. I dare you. I urge you. I cheer you on. Write as badly as you can, now, for ten minutes. Go.

Then post below and tell me how it was to do this experiment!