With the kerfuffle this week about hackers accessing naked pictures of celebrities, it got me thinking about what is on my computer and phone I wouldn’t want shared. I don’t have any naked selfies (sorry to disappoint), but I do have some pretty horrifyingly bad prose lying around. And some God-awful poetry. Overwrought, melodramatic letters to ex-boyfriends, which I keep in order to remember what it’s like to be in that place in a relationship, but that I’d be mortified to have out in public. There are ideas for stories that were either never fully articulated, or lead me to wonder just how drunk I was when I sat down at the keyboard thinking I had this great idea. “Okay, it’s a romance, but it takes place entirely on Facebook.” Wait, maybe that one isn’t so bad….

Ahem. There are the 60,000+ words of three different novels, which eventually led me to The Marriage Pact. Also the dross I produced during several bouts of NaNoWriMo. It’s fruitful dross, and I’m a big believer in the idea that you have to write a lot of sludge to get… wait, is there something good that grows in sludge? I could say something about pearls and oysters, but you don’t really write oysters, do you? Anyway, I think you get the idea and feel free to dress it up with your favorite metaphor.

I can’t speak to whether taking naked pictures of yourself is an integral part of the acting process, but I can say with authority that shitty first drafts are an absolutely critical part of the writing process. Sure, there are probably writers out there somewhere who simply sit down at their desks and produce gold on the first attempt, but I’m going to guesstimate that those writers comprise approximately 0.00001625% of the general writer population. So, it’s pretty much that one guy, and he’s also a hermit who burns his work ceremonially as soon as he finishes it, to “give it back to the trees.”

For the rest of us, there’s just the process. Write a lot of crap, and spend hours rearranging and revising until you have something that’s not crap. And in the meantime, all those murdered darlings and awkward sentences and really horrible ideas are there on your hard drive, reminding you of how far you’ve come, how many hours you’ve put in toward the 10,000 or more it takes to be any good at anything. The embarrassing stuff on my hard drive isn’t a reflection of my talent or my lack of discretion. It’s fertilizer, absolutely essential to anything I might want to grow.

What I’m saying is, if you’re an author (or any kind of artist) and you don’t have anything embarrassing lying around, you’re simply not doing it right.

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I’m M.J. (Manda) Pullen, an author and mom in the Atlanta, Georgia area. I blog about writing, publishing, motherhood, health, psychology and whatever else strikes me in the moment. My current roster of books includes The Marriage Pact series, a trilogy of funny, semi-realistic Contemporary Romance/Women’s Fiction novels. You can find them for all eBook formats and in paperback here.

Writers can explore my other writing and publishing posts or join my writing-focused email list.  I also have workshops in the Atlanta area, including a self-publishing workshop on November 15th, 2014.

MJ Pullen

M.J. Pullen is a distracted writer and the mom of two boys in Roswell, Georgia, where she is absolutely late for something important right now. Her books include quirky romantic comedies and playful women's fiction. She blogs erratically with writing advice, random observations, and reflections on raising very loud kids and dogs. Join her Distracted Readers newsletter list for updates, free content, giveaways and more.