F*ck it
The Vocab Word o’this Week is a swear word. Dig.
Fuck it
How Giving Up Can Get it Done
Or: Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle*
“How To Feed And Keep A Muse: It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.”
~Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
*this is a subtitle I always use for each iteration of this lecture/post, not only because Bradbury talks some about these concepts in the chapter named this, but because I love this chapter title so very much that I have to include it. Apparently, it’s what was written on a ticket he was given by an Irish policeman at one point while he was in Ireland working on Moby Dick, and I just can’t…
We’ve all had those moments–struggling with that long par-4 hole, trying so hard to swing a carefully chosen club just right, and what happens? Plunk! in the pond (thanks, Yertle the Turtle). Only when you’re so frustrated you’re almost going to scream (except you can’t because it’s a golf course and you’re supposed to keep quiet), THEN you think to yourself, “Fuck it!” and just swing the damn thing, and…what? Whoa! 300 yards, straight down the fairway!
It’s a contradiction for the writer: if you force your writing, it won’t come. But if you sit around and wait for the Muse to inspire you, it’s not gonna happen either.
What you want is a delicate balance of these two modes: not waiting around for divine inspiration, but not beating a dead horse, either. And in the middle of these two negative processes is the most valuable step of all first drafts, of any art. It’s a powerful choice, done in the midst and at the end of any first draft. I call it:
The Fuck It Moment
How many writing instructors have you had that tell you to do timed writing, or Morning Pages, or freewrite every day until you’re plaid in the face? Well, there’s a reason for that, particularly when you’re beginning, or labouring through to gestate, a first draft.
What these generative exercises do is tease the Muse into following you. The more you write down — “This is stupid, I remember nothing, I can’t see straight, how much longer, my knees are falling asleep, I have carpal tunnel syndrome…” — the more chance that suddenly in the middle of the dross will emerge a sparkle. Something weird, unusual for you, something you would never plan on writing, something truly worth cutting and polishing and setting in white gold and selling on the dark internet or on Substack. But the little gem wouldn’t have come without sifting through all that dirt first. Ask any miner. Or jeweller.
My own foul-language version of Bradbury’s cute little tripping-through-the-forest Muse concept came first for me through a theatrical experience, not a writing one at all.
Scene: Acting school, CU-Boulder, 1993 or 4 or thereabouts. I’m, like, twenty-one-ish years old, and a total hotshot. I was doing a scene with a good friend. We rehearsed the hell out of it, because it was so difficult. But we were great actors, and we knew we could pull it off.** We worked it and worked it and then worked it again, until we were both exhausted and frustrated and still the scene remained nothing but mediocre at best. Over and over our instructor said, “I don’t understand why this isn’t working for you.”
**The final scene from Chekhov’s The Seagull. Nina comes back and is out of her mind. You know: “I am an actress, I am a seagull,” that one? Yeah…
The scene (as we did it) was shallow, melodramatic, and boring, and we were at our wits’ end how to improve. No amount of homework-rehearsal, private lessons with the instructor, or anything else made it better. In fact, practicing it so much just made it worse—we began to hate it as we burned out on it.
Time came for the final showing in class, pretty much one of the last major bits of graded acting we were to do for our BFA degree. Not only did we know perfectly well our scene still sucked, but the instructor knew, too. We were about to bite it, hard, in front of everyone. What to do?
That’s right: I said, “Fuck it! Let’s just do this” to my scene partner, and we did. Neither of us could possibly work on this anymore, and all the work we had done already wasn’t helping, so. Fuck It.
I giggled through most of my lines, moving around the studio in ways I’d never rehearsed, letting my voice go everywhere within my wide range, finally succumbing to honestly exhausted tears. Then laughing about them. My partner reacted wholly authentically to my weirdness, not sure what to do about any of it other than soldier on.
When we finished, breathing heavily, mussed and sweaty, there was a deep silence in the acting studio.
Then, astonished applause.
Of course, if you know anything about that scene, you’ll realize that what I just described is exactly what was needed: the tragic madwoman and her shocked ex-lover. My forced, depressing-dramatic ideas of how to “act mad” and my partner’s overly-morose ideas of what his sad reactions should be were too calculated and therefore not the correct choices. I had, as Bradbury said, scared the Muse away by whipping the scene to death with what I thought were “good acting techniques.” When I said Fuck It, I let go all those set ideas, all those expectations, all my inhibitions, and went with my impulses, not worrying about whether it was any good because clearly it wasn’t going to be. The result of which is some of the best acting I’ve done to date, and certainly one of the best scenes in that class.
I’m sure you’ve understood by now that this relates completely and absolutely to the process of writing – and most arts, I would aver.
The catch with this kind of thinking, though, is that the letting go cannot and does not work unless first you have a solid base of technique. This is something that Bradbury, in my opinion, doesn’t stress enough in his chapter adorably titled “How to Keep and Feed a Muse.”
If you have been writing every day, if you read constantly, if you take classes, then you will have a good intake and output balance that will mean when you reach your own Fuck It Moment, you will know how to write to keep up with it. If I hadn’t had nearly four years intensive acting training before the above example, you better believe the scene would have fallen apart in a big mess.
Noted YA author Philip Pullman described the writing process at a book signing I attended several years back. He began by describing the involved research process that’s necessary before you begin your first draft, including: copies of research articles, lots of yellow Post-It notes arranged all over them, margin notes and highlighter marks on passages, etc. Then he advised how the first draft actually begins: you throw all the research and the outlines and the Post-It notes out the window, and write completely afresh on something that has nothing to do with any of the notes and such he described above.
We all laughed, but he insisted the research and the Post-It notes and all the rest of it was quite necessary to complete the whole first draft. Even though it’s also necessary to throw them out. Work it, then Fuck it, then do it.
“My favorite [book] is always the one I’m working on, or the one that’s just come out. Not the one I just finished working on, because as soon as the manuscript leaves home, I become convinced that it’s the most appalling piece of earwax that ever slew trees. Not until the typeset galleys arrive for proofing do I begin to think that I’ve been a teensy bit hard on the poor thing. And when the author’s copies of the finished book land on the doorstep, voila! A miracle of transformation. It’s suddenly a dear little book, with such a cute little spine, and the most adorable running heads…”
~Emma Bull, from an interview on greenmanreview.com wayyyyy back in the day
Pullman’s Post-It note phase (whatever that is for you; for young-acting-school-me, it was training and rehearsal. For you it could be planning and reading) is essential to the first draft process–remember, he always started with the Post-its, then threw them away. But he still began there.
Without beginning from good technique, your wild ride with the Muse will leave you with nothing more than bleeding wounds and a soggy mess (Grotowski’s “wet rag” theory of technique-less acting). But with the structure and solid base of technique, experience, and/or training, you’ll get off the roller coaster bruised and shaking, but with a good first draft clutched in your fist.
NOTE: This article began way back somewhere around 2009 as a lecturette for online DU course Writers on Writing. Later (in early 2015), I adapted it when that course was no longer a thing, into a blog post on me ol’ blog. A couple years later (in 2017, I think?) UK-based writing site Writers HQ bought it and I revised it for them. What you read here is a sort of Frankenstein-ing of all three versions, mostly from the Writers HQ revised version. I’ve kept some of the British spelling intact, because it amuses me. Let me know what you think of this concept in the comments. Or, you know, don’t. Because, Fuck it.