Proving You're A Bad Writer
On Dan Harmon and what it means to "aspire" today
I
“Prove that you are a bad writer.” This is Dan Harmon’s advice to aspiring writers when asked. At least, the one he gives most often. The idea is that in order to become a writer, the most important thing one can do is put writing out into the world. But, more often than not for aspirants just starting out, perfect becomes the enemy of good; they judge their work against that of the writers they admire and thus deem it not good enough to share with the world. And so, Harmon’s advice is simple: prove it.
If Dan Harmon and his TV shows Community and Rick & Morty aren’t points of obsession for you, that is fine; you’re probably a mature, well adjusted person. I myself am a super-fan and member of the Dan Harmon is a creative genius camp. Over the past year of my life you could go as far as to say that his shows — as well as his discontinued podcast, Harmontown — gave structure to my life during its most structureless periods. I’ve watched, listened, or read nearly every interview he’s given. I am drawn to hearing him talk about his work and his personal cosmology because he is incredibly honest, equal parts boorish and brilliant, erudite and dirty, in conversation. I’ve studied many different heroes of mine to a similar extent, but thanks to his career flourishing in the time of the internet and his near-pathological tendency to say what is on his mind, I’ve been able to go deeper into his work than any other artist before.
(For some context — I have studied the work of my personal hero Susan Sontag extensively, but I have never tried to create a skeleton key to her work that runs 86 pages.) [This “skeleton key” is unfinished, but is intended to serve as a guide through Season 1 of Community. To make a long theory short, I believe the “content” of the episodes, which upon first glance may appear obtuse or pointless, actually contains latent meanings. Effectively I am working toward a theory that all of season 1 is a meta retelling of the story of making the show; the story of a pre-production process wherein, despite the network’s ceaseless sabotage, Harmon was able to develop a more sophisticated, rule-breaking and genre-defying television show.] (This ambitious and unfinished project is like scores of others I wear on my pubescent artist face, pocks of acne revealing I have hardly matured.)
II
Presumably, to be a writer, one writes just as to be a swimmer, one swims. Adherents to Harmon’s advice are doing something very specific, though. They are acknowledging that everyone who writes is, by definition, a writer and deciding instead that they’d like to be a capital-W Writer.
What makes you a Writer rather than someone who writes is sharing your writing. Harmon’s advice is to prove you’re a bad writer because whether you’re good or bad is beside the point. An aspirant writer proves they are one through the continual practice of sharing work. This is the case across all artistic disciplines, and what all would-be-anything’s should strive for first and foremost: an expressive practice.
To be sure, today’s aspirant does deal with a unique set of cultural conditions. We have tremendous exposure to every kind of creative, artistic work imaginable. Once someone falls in love with a given art form they conceivably are capable of making a work of their own in the medium; the barrier to entry has never been lower, both for aspirants and their prospective audiences. This unprecedented access does have another side; the seeming impossibility of anyone caring about what you’re sharing (this mindset being the primary reason to shift the proposed aims of the writer and all artists to working toward an expressive practice).
One common trope seen today is the aspirant-yet-outside-of sitting on work, reluctant to release their art into the world for want of ideal conditions. We bear witness to this everywhere around us in Los Angeles, where everyone behind every counter wishes they were doing something different, or at least would prefer they were being seen doing something different; in creative communities full of friends who bemoan the methods of distribution and how difficult it is to get their work seen and heard for more than a fleeting moment inevitably crammed between more moments fleeting.
Things in the age of the internet have evolved and will continue to do so. Status and the outward display of status has become disperse and totalizing — we are so much more than our jobs and have so little to show for it. We all are privy to the symbols and signifiers of creative life, the ones we send and the ones signaled by those in our various spheres; we practice symbolizing what we are, in resisting our culture of performance or eagerly and outwardly submitting to it.
III
While still cutting his teeth as a TV writer, Harmon and his fellow aspirant friends started a group called Channel 101; in its early days it was just a small group of friends in a living room, getting together and presenting 5 minute short films to each other. The idea was that the short film served as a pilot, and at the end of the viewings the group would vote on which one they liked the best. Whoever won got to produce and present another episode for the next time they met. What started in living rooms snowballed to include people outside of their immediate friend group, until eventually Channel 101 needed to rent theaters to host their event. The success of channel 101 happened over a period of years, gradually. Any aspirant should note; the reason they succeeded was because they CREATED A SPACE for the expressive practice where all that mattered was a small group of people on a couch.
Channel 101’s success runs counter to prevailing wisdom of how to succeed by using the internet. Performing for just a loyal few is not what we are encouraged to do. Performing on the internet, which inherently is a performance of what we are trying to be and the proof of it, is constantly measured, monitored, by people you do not consider to be your audience. Your audience is some fabled faceless person and you only notice that they are not there; the faces that are there somehow do not matter as much as a hug from a person you’ve never met.
To maintain an expressive practice under the contemporary condition is to remain supremely vulnerable. There is no doubt that Harmon’s success correlates directly to his willingness to fall on his face in public, over and over, in ways that have no apparent valor. In every episode of his (now defunct) podcast, Harmontown, he stands on a stage in front of a group of people with no plan, no script, and proves he’s a bad writer in real time. He allows himself no safety net, no outline. Those who don’t want to listen don’t show up anymore and the ones who stick around, in their sheer willingness to stick around, allow and encourage him to keep going.
IV
So that is why I'm doing this. That is why I’m posting every Friday; every Friday you’ll see a post from me, and you might click it and you might not and I’m aware of that. None of these posts will change my life, not a single one will make me a writer… not a single one. And yet I want to post every Friday because I aspire to a practice of self expression; because I have a lot inside me, and I have a lot I'm thinking about and I want to convey it. Because I want you to come to my show, but moreover I want to show. Throw one of your own sometime — but don’t count heads at the door.
Go without knowing,
Mason Lopez