My friend and mentor, Steven Pressfield, recently featured me in his Writing Wednesdays post. This is the one newsletter I never miss. It was an absolute thrill to contribute to it.
Thank you, Steve!
From the post:
This comes via my friend Charlie Daly, who got it from a screenwriter friend of his.
It’s a trick to get your writing going when you’re stuck.
Charlie’s friend will sit down at his laptop, set his fingers on the keys and tell himself, “And the bad version is … “
Then he’ll start typing.
I realized, when Charlie told me this, that I’ve been using this sneaky bit of business myself for thirty years. I just never had the nomenclature.
The Bad Version. We can all do that, right?
By telling ourselves that we’re only writing the Bad Version, we take the pressure off. Our sentences don’t have to be brilliant. Our dialogue can be lame. We’re free to lose complete track of theme, narrative, everything.
It’s all okay because our aim is only to write the Bad Version.
You can read the full post here.