Dare to be Bad – by Charlie Martin
Okay, so this one is hard. Hi, I’m Charlie, and I’m a perfectionist. And now, having admitted that, I start thinking “wow, is this going to be good enough?”
The fact is that I’m still re-learning how to write. Again. And a big part of my difficulty is I lose my nerve part-way through a piece and start thinking “oh, no one is going to like this” or worse “am I saying too much?”
That was a big part of my previous pass at this yesterday (it’s 2025-04-11 as I type this.) I got started talking about growing up a mildly autistic savant in a tiny cow town and it was, I’m sure, interesting to my therapist — if I still had one — but perhaps a little more self-revelatory than I was comfortable with.
And then I froze, and didn’t get any more writing done all day.
Now, objectively, I’ve been pretty successful with my writing, all things considered. I have a couple of new Substacks — The Stars Our Destination, and Old Programmer Notes — that, to my surprise, got some paid subscriptions. I’ve been writing for PJ Media since it was Pajamas Media, and I’ve written for lots of other markets, from PC Week and CIO to Stack Overflow Blog.
But still, I was hung up.
There were two pieces of advice that I finally remembered — again, I should get tattoos or something.
“If you feel like you have writer’s block, lower your standards.”
and, something from Dean Wesley Smith’s book Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing (WMG Writer’s Guides).
“Dare to be bad.”
The truth is, I don’t know if what I’m writing is good or bad at the time I’m writing it, and about half the time things that I finally pushed out thinking “Well, they can kill me but they’re not going to eat me” — a favorite piece of advice from my father — turn out to be very popular. Sometimes I re-read them in a few days and even I like them.
I think that’s an important insight. I don’t actually expect cannibalism, no one is really going to eat me, but I have too much bound up sometimes in whatever I’m writing at the time.
So what to do about it?
First thing is write faster. I write everything, at least for now, using a “personal knowledge management” tool called Obsidian. Basically it lets me write with Markdown and tracks everything in a collection of files called the “Vault.”
I used to use a tool called Ulysses that is similar in a lot of ways, but it stores its file in a proprietary format and I’ve twice had issues where my proprietary files disappeared. The files were always recovered but twice was too many times.
The advantage of Markdown is that it’s a simple markup, what’s called a “lightweight markup language.” All the fancy formatting I actually need is available with a couple of keystrokes, like wrapping a word in underscores to indicate emphases. So emphasis is really _emphasis_. But the real advantage is that since I can’t mess with fonts and margins and all that stuff, it’s much better for first draft than something like Word, which tempts me to fiddle.
This time, I’ve written everything so far in just under 20 minutes. I’ve talked about the Pomodoro method before, and that’s basically what I’m doing here — Obsidian has a “sprint timer” that lets you set a word goal and a time goal.
In the morning, as a warm up, I set a sprint of 750 words and 25 minutes, and I make it — unless I’m being helped by my roommate Captain Chaos [Hey, he got a ginger cat. He should know what was coming. – SAH]. This is very different than what I used to do when I kept thinking about things.
Thinking is bad. There oughta be a law.
Following Dean Wesley Smith’s advice, though, I now have a sign on my terminal that says “Dare to be bad.” It’s really kind of amazingly good advice. If I’m starting out thinking “hey, this can be bad, no one is grading me” it really helps.
Another bit of advice I picked up from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. I will often start something with a working title of “Shitty First Draft.” (The essay from her book is available on the web from the University of Kentucky, and I recommend it highly.)
A long time ago, I read a poem in Alan Watts’ book The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are that, as an inveterate over-thinker, I found rather comforting. It’s called “The Centipede’s Dilemma”:
The Centipede’s Dilemma
A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg comes after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch,
Not knowing how to run.
Honestly, I think that’s the key here. Dare to be bad. The centipede doesn’t need to think about running — she just runs.
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Dare to be Bad – by Charlie Martin”
Strange, I thought the centipede was dancing not running. [Very Big Crazy Grin]
Note, this is where I’d be going into research mode to Make Sure That I Was Correct on “dancing vs running”. 😉
Hah: https://x.com/i/grok/share/i5EIgwUtYw7tGsq2nVkZszfUR
Nod, I didn’t search long but what I found had “run” not “dance”.
On the other hand, I seem to remember a “play” that should her “dancing” not “running”.
I guess it was easier to show her “dancing” on stage than “running” on stage. [Crazy Grin]
Grok also notes that there are several versions floating around in the telephone game that is the internet.
Or you are recalling the song that e.g. Alastair McDonald recorded on kids’ LPs in the ’70s, called (in his case) “The Wee Kirkcudbright Centipede.”
so I did publish it. I THOUGHT I had. This is just weird.
I show it as coming in late. I wonder if WP’s scheduling clock messed it up, like it does mine sometimes.
The nice thing about essays (as opposed to narrative) is that you can write down lots of fragments of what you need to say, then order them from intro to highly advanced. You may need some support (“so to see what’s really happening we have to chase a ways down this next rabbit hole …”) but that comes in as you consider how you’ll feed it to your audience.
In essays as in stories, I write serially. BUT even when sick I can do blog posts, because I can hold short things in my head.
Oh, yeah, Some people write novels and stories in fragments, out of order. Looks at older DIL.
My boss once told me that I wrote the most perfect emails she had ever seen.
She then said this was holding me back.
When I was asked to write a book (by a magazine editor I worked with for a magazine that had just shut down) I told him, “I can’t do that. I’ve never written a book before.” His response was, “Well, maybe it’s time to start.”
So I submitted a book proposal, had it accepted, and wrote the book. Was it good or bad? At that time I did not know. I really did not care, either. It fit the specifications to which I was asked to write to, and I decided I would let the market decide how good or bad it was.
It was good enough for them to encourage me to submit a second proposal. Followed by another, one more after that and eventually more and more. So long as publishers keep asking me for submissions I figure that answers the “good enough” question. So I don’t worry it.
When he was just starting out as a comic book artist, John Romita, Jr. was slow and meticulous. He couldn’t keep up with the pros. Then one of them told him to throw out his eraser. Trying to fix things was slowing him down, and most of the time, they didn’t need fixing. He was just too close to the work to see that it was fine.
Writing is similar. Chances are, your first draft is better than you think.
[…] CHARLIE MARTIN ON WRITING: Dare to be Bad. […]
This is outstanding advice for many things. One of the things that keeps many of us progressing in skills development, or even homework :), is a fear of being bad. As an older (68 yo) but newish (2 years) member of a martial arts school, I remind the students the value of going to tournaments and being ok with being bad. (yes, do your best, prepare, ect. as well.) Learning to overcome and measuring your success not by medals, but by how much you have progressed in a stressful, but supportive, environment one way to develop life skills. This is also a thought for parents or others after a tournament, “Nail the ride home, after the tournament” per Mrs. Clevenger from a Mason City martial arts school. Nailing the ride home of recognize the development and courage to get out in front of others to compete. Be honest about performance but focus on positive critiques and the personal development.
Life is about developing and overcoming.