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 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…
