newsletter #31: bad art

aka, the bad things i made this week.

Hello reader. How are you this week? Just some brief little thoughts for you today as I prepare for the weekend ahead. The subject: bad art—specifically all of the bad, bad, bad art I made this week. Hope you find me cool and relatable. 

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bad writing

The first piece of bad art I made this week was my initial attempt at writing a newsletter. I wrote almost the entire piece then, the next day, when I re-read what I had gotten down, I hated all of it. I’m not going to scrap it entirely. I’ll just continue to work on it next week and make it better. This problem of hating what I’ve written is recurring for me, which is often why once I’ve had something published, I’m physically and mentally incapable of re-reading it until months later. 

Like, if I see something I’ve written in print at the store, I’ll always glance at the page where my byline is, but I only let my eyes gloss over the actual words. Otherwise I feel uncanny and like I might throw up. This is also why when I write things (as I’m sure is true for all writers) I will read it over and over and over until I hate it as little as possible (even though I’ll still probably hate it a lot) because I know once it is in public (via newsletter, internet, grocery store, whatever) I will try not to read it again until I have enough emotional distance to allow myself to critique. (A practice that is unfortunately vital and the only way for me to improve. Tragic.) 

bad painting

As mentioned in past newsletters, I’ve been doing some painting as of late. None of it is good, that is to say, all of it is bad. I enjoy the process of doing it, nevertheless: the creamy acrylics, mixing colors into new ones, feeling the brush glide across the canvas like spreading butter. It’s an exercise in molding what I imagine in my mind into a physical form, which is what I believe I’m doing when I write. Painting is just another means by which I can articulate, albeit badly. I don’t care that it’s bad, though. It is so freeing to do something without caring about being bad or good. I have to try so hard not to care about what I care about. I wonder what that says about me. My therapist tells me I’m confident so it must be true, since I pay her. 

some of said bad painting lol

bad ideas

When you are a freelance writer a thing you have to do is pitch. This means that if there’s something specific you want to write about, you need to present your ideas to an overworked editor via a beautifully written, eloquent, error-free email. And you spend a long time making sure it’s great, but then at the end of the message you also write (in so many words): but if you hate all of my thoughts, it’s totally fine! Really, I’m happy to jump off a cliff, no worries at all! Chat soon. 

That said, I usually enjoy pitching and don’t take pitch rejection personally—it’s part of it all. But lately I have so any half-formed ideas swirling around in my head and my editor brain rejects all of them before I even give them a chance to be rejected by someone else, and so this week I allowed myself to write out as many horrible pitches as I could think of into a Google Drive document to free up space in my brain and give myself the chance to make them good even though I think they’re bad. 

I keep having to teach myself the lesson that in order to be good at something I have to be so, so, so bad at it sometimes. That being bad is ultimately good.