The "Bad Idea" Trick

Way back in the summer of 2000 I attended a writers' workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, that was moderated by novelist Douglas Coupland. On one particular languid afternoon when none of us were reading anything particularly good to the rest of the group, Coupland suggested we adjourn to our studios with the idea that, the following day, we'd come back with the worst thing we could write, about the worst character we could think of, without intentionally sabotaging the prose. In the end we called the assignment "Bad lives, badly written." The next day we met, turned in our work without names on top, and had Coupland read each of them out loud.


They were, of course, the most amazing things that any of us had done in the short time that we'd been together in all that muggy hammock: A couple of them have even gone on to be published.

The job of being productively creative is draining in ways that almost nothing else can be: It takes massive amounts of effort and, it turns out, massive amounts of blood-flow to the brain. But it also takes a stamina of self-confidence that only the most megalomaniacal among us can sustain for very long without seeing our own prop-wires, and questioning how we could have been so presumptuous as to leave them hanging there so conspicuously like that. When this happens, the typical choices available can include straining to power through the lull, taking a full cleansing break, or simply shunting alongside the sticking point to tackle another part of the project.

All of these strategies has their time and place, but each of them has a trap, too: The power-through can result in dramatic reductions in efficiency, which in turn can make the project psychologically harder to face. The cleansing break can become a knee-jerk response, and returning to the project afterward can gradually become easier and easier not to do. The shunt can lead to continuity problems. Consider Coupland's idea another standard tool in the productivity-maintenance toolbox -- call it "the Bad Idea Trick," as it were. Used sparingly, it can yield positively thrilling infusions of new dynamism for a rough but important patch in the larger work.

One of the ways that I like to use the Bad Idea Trick in my own writing is to open up a translation page like Bing Translator, type into it the most rudimentary and ham-fisted version of the passage I'm trying to write, then translate it to some intentionally difficult-to-map language like Mandarin. Then I copy and paste the Mandarin back into the translation box, map it back to English, and set for myself the goal of trying to make the result legible and continuous to my imagined readers. Another way is to begin free-writing the sticky bit on a legal pad, but in the tone of someone trying to explain the situation to a nine year-old, complete with just that version of imagined interrogatives that we can only expect to hear from nine year-olds. (This version takes longer but leads -- eventually -- to more artful turns-of-phrase, or so at least it would seem to me.)

If you are struggling with a large-scale creative project of any kind, be it a Ph.D. dissertation or an unfinished novel or an art commission or a musical score, I am here to help. Send me an e-mail with the word "productivity" in the subject line, and the two of us will sit down for free initial consultation. I have numerous references available from satisfied clients, and I can definitely help you finish.

Cheers and happy productivity,

Dave O'Gorman
Gainesville, Florida