Don't Give the Critic a Fighting Chance
/This post is a part of a series; if you want to start at the beginning, read this first.
Have you ever pulled out your notebook and pen, opened up a fresh page ready to write, only to sit there waiting for some inspiration to come through?
Or maybe you've been in the middle of writing, gotten on a roll, complete a thought, and then stare blankly at the empty space on your page not sure of what to write next?
The first writing guideline will give you the cure for the pause in your writing practice.
In order to get past your internal critic and write your first thoughts, all you've got to do is keep your hand moving.
Once you stop writing, the internal critic comes online and starts judging everything you've written or think to write. The goal here is to not even give it a fighting chance.
In the guidelines to follow, you'll discover more tips for how to side-step this critic, turn down it's volume, and let yourself get your thoughts on the page. But for now let's focus on practicing keeping your hand moving.
In this practice, I encourage you to scribble, to make up words, to free yourself from all the usual writing conventions that you've been taught amount to "good" writing. That's not the point. The point is in training your brain to go when you say go.
It's kind of like dancing. Once you get started, you let your arms flail, your feet move on their own, and it's easy to keep it going. But once you stop and become self-conscious of how you may look to others, it makes it so hard to get started again.
So try doing just keeping your hand moving and see what happens. Open up your notebook, put pen to paper and just go, keeping your hand scribbling gibberish the whole time if you need to.
I won't lie; if you've never tried anything like this before it will be hard. Your hand might hurt. But like any muscle, it will get easier over time.
By giving this one strategy a try, it will make the other guidelines I share this week so much easier.
After you've tried it, let me know:
How did it feel to get something down on paper?
Did anything surprising come up in your writing?
