YAY

Keep going

The past month I’ve been focusing on Newbie Mistakes, ie. What NOT to do in your writing. Judging by the feedback I’ve gotten, I think some of you find it discouraging if I tell you what’s considered incorrect or trite or hackish. So for this week I want to switch gears into territory that’s a little more encouraging. 

Procrastination

I heard a tidbit an interview by David Allen today that I wanted to pass along to you. Procrastination is not doing something, and feeling crappy about not doing it.

I think a lot of this happens in writing. Back when I used to leave my house, I got people schlepping up to me looking pathetic and saying, "I haven't written anything lately." Why is this? Why would people not-write and then feel bad about themselves for not writing?

I think we want it too much. We want to write well so intensely that we psyche ourselves out and, rather than write something flawed, we don't write anything at all.

Stuckness

Sometimes we get stuck because we don't know what the next logical step is in our story, or we've begun to go down a dead-end and we need to turn around and get back on track. We get the little niggling feeling that something's not quite right and it causes our writing to grind to a stop.

Your Assignment

The next time you find yourself procrastinating, determine if you're psyching yourself out, or if maybe you need to fix something in your story and determine what you should write next. If you're psyching yourself out, give yourself permission to suck. Assure yourself you can fix your problems in edits. If you need to regroup, consider either showing your piece to a critique group to gain some clarity, or do some journaling or mindmapping to figure out what needs to happen next in your story.

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