Write Ugly

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable and pleasing in Your sight, O LORD, my [firm, immovable] rock and my Redeemer

Psalm 19:14

You love words. So much that you can’t stop them from spilling out of your brain. You dash home, clear your schedule, and sit—fingers poised above the keyboard, or a pen in hand over a sheet of paper, ready to breathe life into the figments of your imagination and… nothing. Somehow, somewhere, the words are stuck, refusing to flow.

This is when I channel Marvin the Martian whining…

“Where are the words? There are supposed to be earth-shattering words.”

Even now, writing this, I struggle. Is this how I want to start? Do I have a hook? What about the right structure? Will my words add value, or am I just “adding to the noise“’?

I write in fits and starts, pouring out my thoughts and then I stop—wanting to fix the beginning…again. These same words came so easily as I was sharing my idea with a friend, but the switch from narrator to scribe is sometimes tricky, and we feel the loss of translation.

The best remedy is this: write anyway. Write anything.

In or out of order, get your ideas out of your head and into text. Let your first draft be as ugly and disjointed as it needs to be born. You can clean it up with the next pass. And polish it with another. But you can’t edit a blank page.

Great works of art may come from a potter’s wheel, but it takes more than sitting and spinning the table. Nothing can be formed until a lump of clay is slapped onto its surface. Only then can the artist’s hands run over the surface, watering and wiping, stretching and shaping the malleable clay until form and function is revealed. But the next step is to fire your vessel – not to destroy your work, but to let its beauty take on strength and shine.

So it is with our stories. We want the beauty and the impact to be as present on our page as it was in our mind, but that will take time and work. The beauty is there, residing in its potential, but to be realized it needs shaping.

Don’t deny the world of the marvels your mind has concocted just because it takes some time to communicate them. Slap that lump of clay on the page that is your wheel. Spin it, wet it, squash it—work that clay.

Here are some helpful shortcuts I’ve learned:

• Use brackets if you’re not sure of a word.
• Use bullet points for your ideas, especially sequences. It’s what I’m doing now.
• Use comments to note things you need to research so that you won’t get distracted from content creation.
• Do writing sprints or write-ins with others. A little accountability (and sometimes competition) can make your writing time more productive.
• Place-kittens are images designers and coders use when they don’t have all the content, but they still need to create a structure.
• A friend uses a script-like format for his first drafts, with stage-direction and environmental comments dispersed throughout

Do you see a pattern? You don’t need to have all the pretty words to start sketching your story. You just need to start.

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”

Shannon Hale

You don’t need to have all the pretty words to sketch your story. You just need to start.

Sophia L Hansen is an author and editor with Havok Publishing and loves to write In Other Worlds. She’s lived on a tiny island in Alaska, the bustling cities of New York and Boston, raised kids in Tennessee, and now resides just outside Birmingham, AL. After 30+ years of marriage, seven children, and numerous pets, Sophia still fits into her high school earrings.

You can follow Sophia’s words and worlds at https://www.sophialhansen.com/, Facebook, and Instagram.