I received some negative feedback on a story I’d been commissioned to write recently. After I’d finished swearing, crying, throwing notepads and books across the room, drinking, passing out and sobering up…I realised something. Sometimes you have to write terribly.
To be shit teaches us how to not be shit. Wisdom there is here.
When I was able to go back and look at the feedback I had been given I realised 3 things:
- I hadn’t followed the brief properly
- What I had written was actually not that good. I didn’t enjoy reading it back and understood why I had received negative feedback.
- I hadn’t taken the time to redraft properly before submitting.
Funnily enough the whole episode reminded me of a conversation I was having with my brother earlier this week and it got me thinking about how sometimes you have to write some really shitty stuff before anything good comes out.
Why did my brother make me think about this? Well you see my brother is an actor – check out his IMDB profile here. He’s a good actor too. I’m not just saying that because I’m his brother, (although he will win an Oscar one day if he wants to…guaranteed) I’m saying it because I’ve seen him perform in plays and films and he is actually good. Trust me I would be the first to tell him if I thought
“Blue Steel” – It’s hard to be so incredibly good looking!
he was bad…and I have in the past. Similarly he is one of the first to tell me if he thinks something I have written is bad…or if you want to put it politely “doesn’t quite work”.
Acting and writing are closely related…‘No s**t Sherlock’ I hear you say. With acting you can sometimes give the performance of your life and with writing you can sometimes write the best story, script or play of your life. However with both you can sometimes turn in a crummy performance or a shit script or story. There’s just no helping it. And do you know what? That’s okay.
It’s sometimes okay to be bad or to be in something bad or be bad in something.
Sometimes you need to be bad in order to identify the good stuff. How else are you supposed to know when you’ve written an award worthy story or delivered an Oscar worthy performance? Both my brother and I have turned in some pretty crummy material before, but we have both learnt more about our craft/work by doing it.
Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of early short stories I wrote that were so shit I wouldn’t have used them to wipe my arse on the toilet. Fortunately they never have been used as toilet paper, but also fortunately they have never been sold or published. The best thing about those stories though, was that they helped me hone and get better at writing. In fact reading or viewing old shitty material can be useful to remind you of how far you’ve come and a sobering reminder of your own fallibility as a writer or actor. It serves a dual purpose to keep you going and to stop your ego from growing out of control.
Personal taste always comes into play as well, so it’s important to not get offended when you’ve slogged your guts out over a story/article/script that either isn’t well received or is just ignored by whoever you submit it to. Rejection is part of the game in this business and if you don’t develop a tough skin, you’ll fall to pieces very quickly. Criticism hurts and I am the first to admit that I still find it hard not to take constructive criticism personally. I’m a lot better then I was (thankfully) but every time I read or hear criticism it still stings…no matter how tough my hide has become. That’s okay too though as it means I’m still human.
Check out the size of my ego…
So what’s the point of sharing this with you?
Well it’s a nice ego boost to know that someone is reading stuff I wrote, but mostly I’d like to think it serves as a reminder for anyone in any profession that it’s okay to be shit on occasion. As long as you learn from the shit stuff you do and you’re not shit all the time.
So the next time you do something bad, after you’ve finished raging at other people/yourself/the world/God/the Dalai Lama, Elephants, Yoda, etc, etc…take a deep breath, and remember that occasionally being bad can be a good thing in the long run.
Just don’t wallow in it for too long.
THIS WEEK’S FUN FREEBIE
