Writing Badly

In my middle school English class discussions everyone pretty much had the same opinions about the books we read. There wasn’t a whole lot of room for dissent or nuance. Most people just repeated the obviously correct interpretations. It’s no fun to say something just to agree with everyone else. But when someone said something obviously stupid and wrong, it was so obviously wrong that I never even felt the need to dispute it. Even in high school, when the quality of conversation improved somewhat, I didn’t care much about my classmates opinions. I was fine keeping my thoughts to myself aside from one or two comments for the participation grade.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve encountered more people who are able to express opinions I disagree with more articulately than I could ever disagree. Public speaking and making coherent off-the-cuff arguments are complex skills that ten to require plenty of practice. Childhood and school are the perfect times to be bad at speaking because they have low stakes and the whole point is to learn. By not participating in those class discussions I stunted my public speaking growth. (Or perhaps the causal arrow points in the opposite direction. I lack of talent discouraged me from participating.)

Although it’s less salient, a similar thing happened with writing. I never put much effort into writing well for school assignments. I almost always submitted first drafts I had written the night before the deadline that I would be embarrased to reread even a week later. Now, instead of comparing myself to classmates, I compare myself to the writers and bloggers I read (all excellent, of course. I have impeccable taste.) , and I can see that I’m not a good writer at all. Almost everything I read is much better than anything I could write.

It makes it all the more discouraging when I try to write something and realize that I’m actually not very good at it. I read Scott Alexander and then get frustrated that I’m not writing long, entertaining posts full of stats and citations every other day. It’s hard to remember that (a) that’s not how I write or think naturally, and (b) he’s been at it for much longer than I have, so it makes sense that he would be much better at it.

I know I wrote earlier that I had a bunch of goals and rules for this blog, but I wrote that months ago, and I’m clearly not sticking to those rules. If I were to write my goals as concisely as possible, I would say that I want to become a better writer. I believe the best way to improve at anything is to just do it. And I’ve learned that the best way to “just do things” is to make them easier to do.

When I don’t feel like starting a Saturday long run, I bargain myself down. If I planned to run 16 miles, I’ll ask myself what the longest distance I could convince myself into is. Sometimes it’s 16. More often it’s 12 or 8. Oftentimes, even after I’ve given myself permission to shorten my run, once I get outside and warmed up it feels great and I end up going longer anyway.

I’m not exactly sure how to apply the same practice to writing. It’s much harder to say, “Well I’ll just write a half as good essay (or half as long or effortful). As it is, most of my posts are half as good as I want them to be already, so my only option is settling ahead of time, writing a lot of them, and hoping that the experience makes me a better writer.

I do still intend to revise everything before posting because I think that’s an integral part of the process. But once I have revised something, I should go ahead and post it even if I don’t think it’s amazing. Perhaps sticking to a schedule would also help. I’ll try to post this on Friday and then post another essay every subsequent Friday.

Hopefully allowing myself to be bad will help me write more consistently. Right now I have approximately one reader, so there’s a pretty low cost to being bad. I owe it to my future self (when I’ll have thousands of readers) to become a better writer now. Of course there are other obstacles. I struggle to allow myself to write freely on the first draft, and I’m still in the process of working out a good schedule and affording myself time to write when I have energy and the mood strikes me, but these seem minor compared with the problem of perfectionism.

As a postscript, I’ve been trying to shoehorn the GK Chesterton quote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly” into this post. I don’t think that this would be worth doing if it didn’t provide some value to someone (even if that someone is only myself). Even if I never improve significantly, I do hope that this will be something that is worth doing as badly as I am doing it write now.