Chances are we aren’t even consciously aware of our hardwired expectations when we’re reading. So why do we think that it does? Part of the problem is that the things we’re wired to crave – the things we innately expect in every story (and beautiful writing isn’t one of them) – are tacit expectations. Because, as we’ll be exploring over the next several months, the first step in creating any story has absolutely nothing to do with “writing beautifully.” It can’t. You have to write ugly every single time you begin writing a story, even if you’re already well published. It’s part of the process of creating a story. And in order to write well – to create a story worth reading, a story that can be beautifully written – you have to first write ugly. The point is that surface beauty is not what it’s cracked up to be.

So hold on to your hat, because that’s exactly what we’re going to do right now – dive into something that is decidedly uncomfortable (yes, actually wearing a hat, so this isn’t really two metaphors). In fact, story is often about how to dig out from under the sugar coated, stifling straightjacket of the status-quo, which almost always means diving into what polite society has deemed to be ugly, unseemly, and uncomfortable. Otherwise, you’re basically Hallmark, which is to say, irrelevant, cutesy and dull. To be very clear, by “writing ugly” I don’t mean writing about hard things, painful things, or any kind of “ugliness” – which is utterly crucial to good stories. We’ve been trained to be so fearful of penning anything that feels like “ugly writing” that we often end up creating something far worse. It is heartbreaking how many writers suffer from the deep rooted, often crippling fear of not “writing beautifully” from the very first iteration of the very first sentence on the very first page of the novel.

Beautiful writing is often equated with talent, and without talent, why write at all? It’s this: The myth that beautiful writing is what makes you a real writer, and (an even more damaging belief) that the beautiful writing comes first, before everything else. I’m beginning this month with the overarching granddaddy of them all – the myth that derails otherwise riveting stories before they’re even created. This all too common phenomenon is something I’m going to be deconstructing, myth by myth, for the next several months in my columns here. When it comes to writing, you may have done everything you’ve been taught to do with utter perfection, and precisely because of that, it turns out you’ve written something that is flat, boring and uninvolving.

Wired for story