No Bad Writing July 3, 2020 One of my 2020 New Year's resolutions was to write at least 500 new words every day. At the risk of jinxing myself, I've been able to keep it up so far and hope to finish the year with roughly one-hundred-and-eighty thousand words more than I started it with. Not all of those words, though, are short-story-, novel-, or essay-related. A goodly number of them are letters[1], real paper-and-pen-and-stamp letters to family and friends. As I said in my letter-related post, writing a letter requires you to essentially create a narrative on the fly and do it without being able to go back for corrections, which makes it very difficult. As a result, I consider writing a letter roughly equal to writing a short story. Another sizable chunk of the words I've written so far this year are entries in my notebooks: explorations of characters or tentative plots, meditations on writing and art, ideas that have gotten a hold of me and need to be worked out on paper. On the surface, it doesn't make much sense to consider this writing the same as, say, a novel page. But all writing is communication and to communicate effectively, you must first put your ideas in order, clothe them in the best words, then put those words in the best order to convey them to another mind--even if that other mind is a future you. And there's always the topic of the writings to consider. I recently had to take care of some personal business (which is why this entry is late) and only had access to my notebooks. During that time, I was able to write down a lot of thoughts and observations of events around me. That material will make my future writings richer as I'll be able to use what I saw (or what it made me think or how it made me feel) to flesh out characters and their interactions in future stories. I hardly see that kind of writing as a "loss" when compared to another couple of pages in my novel draft. While I try not to let letter and notebook writing completely take over, and more days that not get my 500 new words down as part of a story or essay, even if my ratio of letter/notebook to manuscript writing were higher than it is, I'd still feel I was moving my writing forward. There's no such thing as bad writing. [1] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/the-humble-letter.txt (c) 2020 by Andrew Gudgel email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com