In Defense of Shit

Not in the way it sounds. Well, sort of, but not really.

A special treat this week: this is the original text of a sub-chapter from the upcoming book. I felt the need to self-edit that version so as not to write “shit” 17 times in a textbook.

I want to start by telling you a story for a prospective movie. This isn’t something I wrote, but it was a script that eventually got made into a very popular movie. It’s a story that you’re all familiar with. Whether you realize that or not based on what you’re about to read, it’s important for what I’m talking about today, and here it is.

We open on the fourth moon of the planet Utapau, where a heavyset young boy looks up into the sky and sees a large ship orbiting. He finds his father, Kane, an aged old warrior, and his brother Deak and tells them that they’ve been found at last.

Right at that moment an evil warrior arrives and kills Deak. Kane and his son escape and travel to their home planet of Aquilae, which has recently come under the rule of Governor Hoedaack, First Lord of the Aquilean System and Surrounding Territories, at the behest of evil forces who want to eliminate those on the planet who still resists their new galactic rulers, represented by the evil Prince Valorum. Clieg Whitsun, one of these rebels, is arrested in a nightclub as he tries to organize a spy mission.

While Hoedaack and his trusted general are wary of conquering Aquilae because of the legendary status of the general they will be facing, Count Sandage, a corrupt planetary noble, counsels the planet’s King Kayos to give in and succumb to the evil conquerors and avoid potential war.

There is much debate in the planet’s senate over how to respond - the general wants to go to war, the religious leaders want to give in and maintain the status quo.

Kane and his son eventually arrive, and Kane passes his son off to the general as he reveals that he himself is dying, his body having been partially replaced with machine parts. 

Meanwhile, Whitsun, who has escaped capture, returns to the planet with the bad guys in hot pursuit. The general goes to save King Kayos’ daughter, who is studying at the Academy, just as an attack on the planet occurs. The King is killed, as is the entire army. The only two survivors of his convoy end up stranded on a strange planet and wander around before they happen upon the general, with Kane’s son, and the King’s daughter, who have also managed to escape.

Having now regrouped and met with the queen, the general flees on her orders to the Opichi system, where the Chrome companies will give him whatever he needs to put her daughter on the throne. They head to a spaceport where they meet Kane, still alive, put the princes to sleep and hide them in containers to smuggle them to safety... ¹

Frankly, it only gets more confusing and convoluted from there, with characters splitting up, pursued by a representative of the evil forces, before they regroup to attack the evil Prince Valorum. I also condensed that considerably as I went on because I could see eyes glazing over as they read it, I myself was getting bored and confused, and frankly it’s an overload of detail that’s really hard to process in real time.

But nevertheless, it’s a story that you and most of the world came to know and love. Eventually. But we’ll put a pin in that for now. 

Why this matters is because one of the things that I’ve struggled to convey to students over the years is, perhaps somewhat naturally, one of the main things I’ve had trouble accepting as a writer myself. And that is that writing is a process. Most often what we get as viewers, as readers, as students, is a finished product. Not just a written script that’s gone through numerous revisions and rounds of feedback, but a finished film whose script has been translated into amazing images and given life by riveting performances, insightful directorial choices, and a final re-write in the edit room. 

But those are finished pieces that have gone through a process of refinement and have reaped the benefits of a small army of creative talents putting their mark on them. Too often we look at a finished result and it paralyzes us because that’s not what’s springing through our fingers directly into the keyboard and into a Final Draft document. 

Growing up, it blew my mind and sort of messed me up when I learned about deleted scenes, or alternate takes of popular songs. I read the book Jurassic Park because I was obsessed with the movie and was furious at how different it was - I threw it across the car on a road trip when I got to the part where Ian Malcolm died. How could something have been changed so much from page to screen²? 

Raymond Carver is one of my favorite writers. He’s famous for short stories that convey depths of feeling and resonance through the smallest events. Incredibly spare and minimalist. All about what’s not being said, what’s not being done. I went through a phase - as we always do with the writers we admire - where I was trying to copy him in my writing, and I hated what I was producing because it wasn’t as sparse and precise. So I moved on to other idols that I thought I could more successfully ape.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned that Carver himself wrote initial drafts that were much more sprawling and wore everything that was so beautifully reserved in the final product more openly on their sleeves. It was through the editorial process that his work was cut closer to the bone and his stories became what they are.

Because writing is a process. 

Nothing you write is final. Not until it’s published or produced - sometimes not even then. You can always edit, change. You can always make it better.

But you have to start with something.

The other line I like to use with students is that you have to give yourselves permission to write something bad so that you can then make it good. You have to be willing to write shit, and you have to be willing to put in the work that comes after have done so. Because contrary to popular belief, writing may be the one forum within which we actually can polish a turd. 

I like to say “write shit” because it gets a laugh, you can see them perk up - ooh, professor Sailor swears! - but the more I think about it the deeper that really is. We hear and use the term “vomit draft,” but I may actually prefer “shit draft.” Vomit is something we flush and try to forget about. It serves no purpose once its expelled. Shitting, like vomiting, is a biological necessity - it clears us out and rids us of waste - but it can also fertilize. It provides organic material that in the wild, or when packaged for consumer use, becomes a part of something beautiful - trees, flowers - or even something that can give life - fruits, vegetables, grains.

Shit creates life. 

You have to write shit because you have to get all those details and ideas that clog your head out of there. Otherwise you can get overloaded and paralyze yourself. You also have to write shit because it’s going to provide the organic material that’s going to grow into your eventual script or story.

The story example I gave you at the beginning, that’s got a lot of shit. A lot of details. Details are great, details are essential, but we’re not going to appreciate any of those details if we can’t follow them. You have to find a framework to hang them on so that we don’t get lost in them, and also so that you can decide which ones are expendable, while also keeping in mind that having those details is what’s going to set your story apart and keep it from being cookie cutter.

When George Lucas wrote the rough draft that I summarized above, he knew it wasn’t quite there - he was just getting everything out of his head, all of those amazing details and ideas he had come up with. It was over the course of subsequent drafts that he took all of those details and fit them into a more streamlined story. Starkiller became Skywalker. The two escapees who wander the planet and run into Kane became R2D2 and C3PO. I didn’t mention it but Wookees were in there, robots, etc. He just had to find a better way to introduce them all. The elements were present, but he hadn’t arranged them in a way that was engaging or completely successful. 

All of this great, expansive, novelistic detail had to get chipped away and it can be easy as a writer to say, “But that’s important, I want this to be complex!” But in making the story simple - not just for comprehension, but for budgetary reasons - he made it something that everybody could follow, and he was able to take all of those details and fill in the corners and create this world that has grown and endured.

We take it for granted now because it became popular in its final form, but it didn’t start that way.

Part of the way that Lucas was able to find and refine his story was by learning from previous stories and copying useful elements - Kurosawa, The Hero with 1000 faces, Flash Gordon. Lucas was especially inspired by Kurosawa, and interestingly enough it was as he moved his script closer to the storyline to Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress that his movie became much more focused and clearer. And because he had spewed all of that amazing gobbledygook earlier in the process, he was later able to populate a simple and universal story with the details that made it unique and memorable because he shat out those details to begin with. 

There is also, it should be said, something valuable in writing shit even if nothing ever comes of it. Too often, especially in the film industry, we think of art and creation from a results-oriented perspective. And sure, none of us want to do bad work - we all want to emulate and measure up to the writers and filmmakers that we revere, and who have touched us to irrevocably in our lives - but the argument can nonetheless be made that an over-obsession with objective quality, whatever that even means, is a degrading and industrial way to think about the whole creative endeavor.

The true measure of the value of creation as an act is not only the effect it has, even if in part, on an audience - which itself has nothing much at all to do with any measure of objective quality - but the effect it has one the person who made it. Creativity nourishes the soul and makes us fuller and more interesting people.

And odds are, the shittiest thing an individual writes or makes will be ten times more interesting than the most competent “product.” Even if it isn’t, technically speaking, as “good.”

So yes, put in the effort to make it better to the extent that you can, sure, but don’t be too precious about it.

Write and make shit.

-cs

1. This summary is a paraphrased and condensed version of the breakdown of the first draft of Star Wars as described by J.W. Rinzler in The Making of Star Wars.

2. I genuinely believe that, in my imbecilic child’s mind, I was reversing time and expressing an anger at a beloved character somehow being retroactively murdered at the hands of the person who created them in the first place.