In Praise of Bad Writing

Early in my teaching career, a writer said to me snarkily, ‘You’re not teaching creative writing, are you? All that bad writing will be horrible for your work!’ All that bad writing: it has been years now, a whole career of it. And some of it has been truly appalling: wincingly awful, full of cliché and bombast, bad ideas, badly executed, perverse and often narcissistic; bad writing that has no affect, no grace, makes no sense, generates nothing but a boring experience for the reader. It has at various times left me angry, disappointed, jaded, but – like anything which is difficult – it has also taught me more than I could have imagined. Over the years in the classroom I have come to see that in fact, far from being bad for my work, the bad writing has become the work: it’s the point. The shortest workshops are always the ones where were the work is good. Because . . . what can you say? Where the writing has successfully achieved the alchemy of a considered, meaningful private exchange between writer and reader, there is not much to discuss. All we can do is report on the experience. Bad writing, on the other hand, is where the action is. Bad writing presented to a class exposes the writer to all the things that they don’t know about the world, and many things they don’t know about themselves. 

~

But what do we mean by ‘bad’? Is it the same as my snarky friend, who was also somehow implying bad to mean ‘not as good as me’? In a workshop I led for English literature colleagues, I presented the group with examples of student work. One example was a pastiche of Gothic literature, a letter written by Dr Frankenstein to Count Dracula, using faux-period language and mannered, convoluted sentences.


‘Ugh, that writing is so bad! That’s all you can say about it!’ said my disgusted colleague, himself an expert in English Renaissance poetry, his territory the sonnet, the little songs of a civilised, Italianate life. 


Yes, I agreed with him, it was bad: derivative, pan-historical, groaning under the weight of cliché. The piece had grown out of fanfiction, which drives obsessive engagement with plot details and world-building and is often the most obscenely badly written stuff I have ever read, and yet at the same time the most passionate. The piece was so bad it was good, because there is so much you can extrapolate from this in class: not least, questions about the nature of gothic literature driven by the intertextuality of mashing up two different timeframes – Mary Shelley’s morality tale (1818), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1896). With eighty years dividing Dr Frankenstein and Count Dracula, how are these two fictional characters related in the modern imagination? Already there is at least half a class and we haven’t even started unpicking the clichés, let alone the reason why this student chose this particular territory for his storytelling. What is his relationship with gothic literature? Why this voice? Why now? Learning? Everyone will have pages of notes by the end of class. 


This is because, in the university at least, bad writing must be taken seriously. It must be assessed and graded and given some kind of coherent critique. Standards are applied, and cross examined by external assessors, criteria are written and validated. Within the neurotic form-filling of the university system, bad writing receives more attention than it might from the publishing industry. Although our assessment criteria – while insulated from the demands of the industry – still cutely requires Distinction-level writing to be of a ‘publishable standard’. But, at the same time, it becomes clear in the workshop environment that there are many, many books of bad writing published. Society at large is full of cliché and commonplaces, lazy ideas, propaganda, misrepresentation and fake news, and what Milan Kundera calls ‘the noisy foolishness of human certainties.’ So it follows in cultural production, and in creative workshops, when we apply the pressure of attention to this bad writing, space opens up for new, more expansive ways of thinking, richer access to language, a more critical perspective. 


Once we see that unpicking bad writing is a way of interrogating what is true, both about ourselves and other people, teaching creative writing becomes about so much more than simply reading bad writing. As Rachel Cusk notes in her essay In Praise of Creative Writing, ‘Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels the need to assert a “true” self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every social and personal network, has given rise to a “false” self.’


Language is a system of agreements between those who use it, so that when I say red shoe, you agree that you will know what I mean, and picture a red shoe, not a green elephant, or an orange baboon. And because language is a system of agreements, then it’s only through thinking together, or at least in proximity with one another, that we can expand the meaning and context of those agreements. 


In these terms, a class on Point of View becomes more than a discussion about grammar and pronouns, but also identity. When we think about Character, we wonder how we see and represent others. In a class on Structure, we might consider how certain stories end and imply meaning, and question the pervasive mythologies of ‘popular’ fiction. We think about what it might mean to disrupt the timeframe of a story to reveal something interesting and new. Or we might consider the way in which we write about place or landscape and our increasingly fractious, polarised relationship with the natural world. Technology has given rise to questions on form and audience, and we must always ask who are we writing for – and why? And what about AI? When we get to the minutiae, to the details of spelling and grammar, and to English as a second or third language, we are compelled to consider, who owns grammar anyway? What do we mean by corrections? All these questions emerge in our considerations of bad writing. And so, in the workshop, a writing class becomes something else, closer to an intersection between philosophy and psychology, discursive, challenging, fascinating, even dangerous territory.  

~

Take the example of D, an enthusiastic contributor to the workshop. Every week he reads the work of his classmates and comments on it assiduously. He makes intelligent interventions to our discussions, and clearly reads a great deal. The class seems to like and respect his feedback. He’s in his early thirties and has harboured ambitions to write a book since he was a teenager. Yet when his turn comes around, his submission is late and scrappy – only a couple of paragraphs of a scene sketching out the story of a young man and his bullying brother. There are some vivid flashes of character, but the whole piece reads as rough and tentative. In class, he presents with a long preamble and a red face, telling us he knows it’s not very good, but that’s all he had time for, mumbling something about being busy at work. After this, the atmosphere of the session chills as he becomes increasingly defensive in the face of feedback. ‘I didn’t have time!’ he replies angrily to pretty much any comment and then the class retreats and the debate shuts down too early; we’ve only sustained about fifteen minutes of discussion out of a usual thirty. When it’s over, he slinks out of class without a word. 


The following week in a tutorial D is more forthcoming. He tells me how disappointed he is in himself. He’s developed a bad case of writers’ block, so much so that whenever he sits down to write, doing almost anything else feels more enticing; he is ashamed and frustrated. ‘I’ve wanted to do this class for so long but now that I am I just can’t write!’


We discuss Simone Weil’s ideas on attention, which emerge out of her thoughts on teaching. Which is to say that Weil considered attention to be the ‘object of all studies’ – essentially, before her students could learn anything they had to be receptive, focused, in a state of pure attentiveness. Weil’s point being that preconceptions give rise to mistakes, false understandings. She uses the example of pride as a kind of ‘tightening up’ of the mind, but there are plenty of other emotions at play here – judgement, envy, fear, shame. I suggest to D that he tries an exercise: that he writes down in his notebook – before he starts work on his creative project – exactly what is on his mind. Simply as a means of listening to his own self-talk. Whatever he wrote wouldn’t be for show, but rather an exercise in listening. 


Term jogs on. And, about a month later, D presents a piece to class of a markedly different quality. This is now a fully formed short story. The bullying brother menaces and gaslights the narrator, who becomes increasingly anxious and unhinged through the pages of the story. The overall effect is chilling. He’s produced a promising slice of psychological drama, and the class response is suitably admiring. I ask what changed between the first and second draft. D tells the class how it was the exercise that has made the difference. ‘All those things I was saying to myself. I gave them to the brother in my story.’ 

~

Before he’d even arrived with his full attention on the page, there was this voice. Needling, undermining. Getting in the way. By exorcising it, he freed himself up to write. By listening to his own self-talk – the language in front of the language – he was able to attend to the loud, insistent static that exists in the spaces between thought and feeling and language. And, even better, do something creative with it. All those learned responses that lead to error on the page, that tighten us up, stop us from thinking, making connections, playing. How we overcome this to move closer to our own territory is an essential question for anyone who wants to develop their writing practice. In this way, D’s bad writing held a clue to understanding something more profound about how he was seeing the world. 


This is what Virginia Woolf describes in her essay Professions for Women, where she shows how – in order to make space for her writing – she had to kill ‘the Angel of the House’. This Angel is her personification of the social conditioning of women:

Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must – to put it bluntly – tell lies if they are to succeed.

In the workshop, those lies turn up in the sentences, in the assumptions the writer makes about character, the cheap psychology, the commonplaces, a whole history of received opinion and anonymous authority. The growing edge for any piece of work is sharpening the quality of the writer’s gaze. Improving the precision of the words, the depth of vision, the clarity of mind. Figuring out what bad thinking underlies the bad writing. 

~

This is why the subject is a political issue. So much so, the CIA invested in its inception. Creative Writing workshops in the US – specifically the famous school at Iowa, which included John Cheever, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell and John Berryman among its faculty, and which preceded and influenced the rise of creative writing in the UK – were supported in the 1950s and 1960s by the CIA as a means of safeguarding democracy. They saw in the workshop structure a system which fortified the values of citizenship, promoted literary individualism, and combatted the authoritarianism of the Communist enemy. They recognised that there was something uniquely transformative about a class in which every writer and every reader is suddenly very aware of, and accountable to, the language they use.


Of course, one counter-argument to this is to observe, as Eric Bennett does in Workshops of Empire – his study of the rise of creative writing in post-war America – that the workshop gentrified the practice of writing, took it off the streets and out the bars; it took it from the pens of weird, itinerant poets, and tethered it to the ivory tower, thus detaching it from the anarchy of the savant or the auto-didact or the overtly political. It encouraged neoliberal subjectivity, the individual with their hero’s journey, created a good model for the American Dream. In The Program Era, Mark McGurl likewise argues that the workshop changed the literature published in America, identifying the well-behaved MFA novel as a distinct strain in American letters. 


The UK is similar but different in that it didn’t come to the subject until much later. Malcolm Bradbury’s gentleman’s degree at UEA started in 1971; he would meet his only student Ian McEwan in the pub for tutorials. By the 1980s it had grown into a serious ‘culture machine’ and by the time I studied there in the 1990s there were Booker Prize winners among the alumni. But I soon realised when I began to teach that there were no procedures for teaching Creative Writing, and not much pedagogy – aside from a few esoteric books from the US. Writers were hired to teach by example. My own experience of attending workshops on my MA was more like an extended ‘meet the author’ session than what we might recognise now as a class. All those criteria and standards and quality assurance documents came about only as the subject became slowly digested by the university system and were in some cases a necessary professionalising corrective. But with its assimilation came another problem – that of institutionalisation, something which no creative subject can withstand for long. 

~

To be a creative person in the world demands retaining an openness to the childlike part of ourselves, to keep at least in touching distance with play. Creativity is how we encounter the world: reaching out through our attention to our immediate surroundings, trusting our instincts. As babies and young children, we use all our senses – touch, smell, taste, sound, sight. We play to figure out how objects work, how people work in relation to ourselves, and, as we develop, what is safe and unsafe. We solve problems, imagine worlds, invent people and places. As Winnicott observes in Playing and Reality, it is ‘in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self’.


The old, quiet, donnish, Platonic model of the university which promotes rationalism and order doesn’t have much time for the chaos and disorder of playing, for the unexpected, or the interdisciplinary, for the maverick, the uncontained, or the – god forbid – inner child. Encouraging creativity in adults comes with a whiff of sophistry; it’s too solipsistic, too close to self-expression. Teach it in Art Schools! But the subject is stubbornly popular, and in the newly marketised universities where bums on seats matter it’s now tolerated even while ‘no one quite understands what it is you do in creative writing!’ (a professor once bitched to me at a conference). But I get it. Phrases like ‘discovery of the self’ sit uncomfortably in an environment where a certain kind of objectivity is valorised. How do we measure the impact of a student whose half-finished novel has allowed them to parse some difficult feelings about their divorce? How does producing a collection of smart-witted short stories about the zeitgeist fit into a checkbox marked Student Experience? How does becoming a more self-aware individual contribute to the economy? 

What is being taught is something which we can’t quite pin down, because it is in its nature experiential.

~

Critiques of Creative Writing are too often focused on outcomes rather than process, and what makes the workshop unique, and perhaps uniquely useful to us right now, is the nature of the process. Situated in any comfortable room – twelve (ideally) seats around a table, boardroom style, or simply a circle of chairs. The peculiar dynamic that occurs in a space where a group of people share with each other their bad writing. For all the accusations of solipsism, one of the elements of improving bad writing lies in the very social act of showing it to other people. In any given class you have a group of strangers prepared to analyse and prod at language to see what might be hidden underneath. 


But it’s a tightrope. In some workshops it can all go horribly wrong. Feelings get hurt, people get angry, offended. People get triggered, argue. But learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and group dynamics, like every other thing in motion, are unstable. This is the process too. Developing a tolerance for each other, however different, or difficult, is part of the experience of being seen. We learn from and with each other, not in isolation, and increasingly it seems to me that what students want is the opportunity to connect. Not on a superficial level, but to share private thoughts which often matter to them a great deal. And so, consequently, ‘all that bad writing’, taken seriously, has become something else: a route to being read, a fostering of connection and discussion, tolerance and proximity. 


Which is why it matters very much where these workshops take place. Getting through the door is never a given. In the early 2000s I was hired to teach a workshop for the inaugural Proud Words festival in Newcastle. It was the first time in the UK that there had been a dedicated space for LGBTQ+ people to come together and celebrate literature in this way. The workshop was in a theatre, and I was told the class had sold out. But when I got to the auditorium, I couldn’t find my students. The workshop tables had been set up on the stage, which wasn’t ideal, but all the people were scattered as far away from that central table as they could get; they were lurking around the edges of the auditorium, literally in the shadows. It took me the first half of the session to get everyone round the table, to trust each other, to not assume that they were the only queer in the room. When I asked them why they had come they all said, ‘Because it was advertised as a safe space.’ One woman said, ‘Because I tell a good story down the pub.’ She hadn’t even brought a notebook or pen.

~

In a free society the right to write, or even to think, might be considered a basic expression of subjectivity and freedom, but, in reality, access – even to one’s own mind – is bound up with a multitude of social codes and expectations, hierarchies and inequalities. In an ideal world, the subject would be taught in schools; until then, it is vital that anyone who cares spends time agitating fores as much as possible for open access to workshops across the spectrum of provision from community groups to universities. I know I am lucky to have spent most of my teaching career at Birkbeck, where the diversity of my classes contributes to the high quality of the conversations. I am always moved and surprised by – and deeply interested – in the variety of knowledge that my students bring to the room, and the increasing urgency with which they want to be heard. Despite everything, the numbers of applicants for the courses keep rising, partly I suspect, because there is an increasing need for a space in which to think together. The students I teach are often in states of transition, in between jobs, relationships, careers, countries, recovery. The workshop gives a structure and a voice to these transitions, the practice of daily writing, thinking, reading, and then coming together to share, allows for a more authentic, truer voice to emerge. 

~

‘Communality,’ argues Rachel Cusk is ‘suggestive . . . of the deficiencies in the social milieux.’ Deficiencies which have become more blatant through the pandemic, but also before that, through the ubiquity of technology, which, contrary to the mirage of connection, was already contributing to an epidemic of loneliness. Add to that a sudden and confusing and accelerated polarisation, and we find the future has delivered us to a strange new reality, where genuine human connection and affinity is increasingly difficult to find IRL, while we notice with unease the changing patterns of the weather and the impoverishment of the natural world. 


We have been half-tamed by the haptics of technology, which already fits Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism: ‘the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model “citizen” of a totalitarian state . . .’  Except, instead of a state, we are governed by strange feudal technology companies that exist far from any direct influence we might have on their operation. And the AI embedded in our word-processing software suddenly becomes the arbiter of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. 

Under these conditions then, the workshop becomes a place of refuge and resistance. The threat is no longer communism, but various forms of fundamentalism, assisted by the broken mirror of the internet. The workshop becomes a space not so much for cultural production but for digestion, writing as thinking, as questioning, experimenting. And, so much better, as a space of live engagement where these discussions can be had with real live people, face to face. If broken things can ever be mended it will be through the repair available to us through language. Long may our bad writing lead us to what is good. 

Julia Bell is a writer and academic, she is the author of three novels, the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan) and the book-length essay Radical Attention (Peninsula Press). Her essays and short stories have been published nationally and internationally including in the TLS, the White Review and the Paris Review and broadcast on the BBC. Her poetry has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Her latest book is a memoir-in-verse - Hymnal - published by Parthian Books. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. 

Return To Issue