Why You Need to Leave Mistakes

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This post is a part of a series; if you want to start at the beginning, read this first.

One place where you can get sidetracked while writing is when you edit at the same time.

This is especially hard even for seasoned writers like myself because we want to writing something “good” is part of our job. But it's another reason why writing by hand can be so powerful. 

Unlike typing on a keyboard, where the backspace button is right there next to all the others keys, writing by hand (especially with a pen) makes it harder to change what you've written. 

Sure you could use pencil, but erasing requires you to turn over your pencil or grab a separate eraser. 

When we write by pen, the tendency to correct something is usually done by crossing out the mistake.

For the sake of getting yourself to write unedited (at least for the first draft), your second writing strategy to practice is to leave mistakes as they are. 

As Natalie Goldberg says:

Don't cross out.

You heard me right.

Let mistakes dangle in the air; let them make your writing messy. You might find that they also make the writing exciting. On more than one occasion, I've reread something that I wrote by mistake and realized that it actually had some truth in it. A Freudian slip of the pen. 

Especially if you're writing to do some self-reflection or some introspection, this practice will help you get to the meat of what's inside of you. I mean that is the point isn't it?

And if you're gunning for a creative practice, well, that requires thinking outside of the box. 

The Internal Critic is trying to keep you safe. It’s got it’s place. But in a writing practice, we want the exact opposite. Sure you can edit it later, but you've got to first get out what is inside you.

So tell me …

  • Have you tried to write without crossing out or erasing your mistakes? How hard was it to not swipe a line through it?

  • Did you find some kernel of truth in what came out of your pen?

Like any other practice, this one may take a while for you to adopt but the rewards are so worth it.