Authors Writing Badly and Inviting Us to do the Same

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant at Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, contributed this post.

When I sat down to talk with Wisconsin author and investigator Linda Godfrey about the hardest part about writing, I felt as if I had struck gold. She delivered the biggest, most valuable nugget when she said that the best thing she can do for herself as a writer is “giving myself permission to write horrible things badly.” Here, a professional writer admits that she has to get out of her own way and just write—no matter how awful it might come out the first time. Linda is not the only professional writer to say this. Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser admits “I think it’s that need to do it perfectly instead of messily… and I still struggle with that because I want to sit down and I want to keep at it until I get it how I want it to be, and a lot of times you simply can’t do that.”

Although there were several, one of the happiest discoveries through the Wisconsin Writes project was that of writers showing how messy, recursive, and hard writing can be. They help unlock part of the mystery of writing, showing us, in the words of writer and educator Molly Magestro, “you don’t just sit down and spit something out and it’s golden.” The icing on this literary cake is that when each Wisconsin writer shows part of his/her writing process in the videos, they share an established assumption that they will go back during and after their writing process to make their writing better. Stuart Stotts agrees. He shares part of his process while editing two books that are almost done. He admits that all of his books have taken at least four or five drafts to complete, and states “I don’t know anybody who just sits down and writes and ‘here it is, my book it’s done.”

There is power in showing students that even the best writers in the room have to stop, think, try on, delete, and get over the idea that polished, good writing will just flow every time they sit down. Whether it is an author, an educator, or a peer, students learn valuable lessons each time they experience someone else’s thinking. Sharing our thinking as we write is a great strategy to explicitly teach students different parts of a writing process, whether they are working on brainstorming, putting a writing plan into action, or revising.

Seventh grade teacher and writer Pernille Ripp provides some important advice for us, and especially for students in Wisconsin: “Just get that horrible first whatever it is out of us…you can go back and change it.” She encourages us to just write, no matter what level or how awful because revision is such an important part of a writing process.