Fast, Bad and Rong: A Mantra for Creating the New and Impossible
I remember reading the very first Word doc manuscript of Steve Markley’s Tales of Iceland. It was riddled with red squiggly lines — a…
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
I remember reading the very first Word doc manuscript of Steve Markley’s Tales of Iceland. It was riddled with red squiggly lines — a bloodstained battleground of misspellings and grammar casualties. I was floored.
Steve was a published writer — a real author! I had just admitted to myself that I wanted to be a writer, and Steve was the only real author I knew. How did he miss those? Was he illiterate? Didn’t he know the difference between their and there?
Of course, the abundance of red squiggly lines were only proof of how much of a professional Steve was. He was operating by the code of creators:
Don’t write and edit at the same time.
Don’t make and critique in the same breath.
Misspelling words while crafting a story should be the least of your concerns.
I recently learned that Physicist and author Safi Bahcall employed a similar manta to help him neglect the red squiggly line in writing his new book Loonshots: FBR. Fast, Bad and Rong.
Fast, Bad, and Rong
When sitting down to create, FBR is Bahcall’s compass.
No going backward to fix red squiggly lines. Don’t remember a person’s name? Make it up. The date of an event? Invent it. Not sure how many people gathered for MLK’s “I have a dream” speech? Take a guess and move on.
Keep moving forward. Valuable energy is lost by moving between creation and fact-checking. Making it good and right is a job for another time, another place, another person. Even if that person is you, tomorrow.
I love FBR.
But FBR is so far from my nature it’s comical.
I’m calm and calculated. I like to think things through deeply, carefully consider courses of action. I’m slower to act and conscientious of my words and actions. It’s why writing suits me as a way to communicate over ad libbing. It’s why I prefer to carefully prepare my talks and workshops vs. winging them. It’s partially the reason why I’m slow to respond to texts or emails. I’m thinking…
And yet, intellectually, I know FBR is key to creating the new and impossible.
FBR is why Morning Pages, or stream of conscious journaling, is so powerful. The stakes are low. You swiftly write whatever comes to mind, judgement-free, until you hit three pages. (The juicy stuff really starts to flow on page 3 after you’ve unclogged the gutter and tap into a deeper source.)
FBR is also how Disney imagines new and fantabulous storytelling experiences in their Imagineering department.
FBR is what makes the Improv Yes, And game work.
FBR is what launches successful businesses. Startup investor Mark Maples said that 93% of his firm’s exit profits have come from businesses who’ve pivoted away from their initial idea. Meaning, 93% of his successful startups were wrong first before they were right. 93 per cent! Maples admits: “Should we even care what the initial idea is?”
Occasionally FBR might even turn out to be good and right. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says that the biggest opportunities are in areas where no consensus exists on whether an idea is good or bad: “You are investing in things that look like they are just nuts.”
The First Draft of Anything
Of course, we don’t finish at Fast, Bad and Wrong.
There’s nothing more frustrating than an unpolished work deliverable. As the reader, please don’t send me Fast, Bad and Wrong. As the customer, don’t sell me Fast, Bad, and Wrong. I want it edited, polished, useful, accurate.
To get there, we might have to try a boatload of things that might not work. Hemingway famously wrote 47 endings to A Farewell to Arms.
The difficulty of the creator is having the courage to ship something that lives between Fast, Bad and Wrong, and Perfect. But if you’re anything like me, if we were to err, it might be leaning too far toward Perfect. And therefore, never shipping the thing at all.
The next time you sit down to create, remember the Hemingway-ism:
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
Write fast. Write bad. Write rong. Write now.
And turn off that damn red squiggly line while you’re doing it.