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This is where I ramble about life, the internet, and creative writing. 🙂 |
 Scribbles & Notions Welcome to my blog. This space exists mainly for me to keep myself focused and writing regularly. |
A new month, a new blog post! Hello, my friends. Happy February!  I hope that things are going well for all of you in this wild and crazy world. It's been a few days since I last updated this blog so here I am, dutifully writing another article on things that have happened to me this week and what I've learned from them. To begin, I am happy to announce that I've finally finished my Advanced Data Management class at WGU. It is a huge weight off my shoulders and I am happy to finally have the extra time available again to read some more books because of it. In my previous post, I mentioned how I had purchased a novel titled Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. So far it's been pretty good, I'm only two and a half chapters in but I'm really liking it. It has rich exoplanetary worldbuilding and hard science fiction, two things I love. Also, now that I have extra time available to me again, I've signed up to the Goodreads 2025 reading challenge with a goal to read at least 10 books before the year ends. I'm hoping to achieve that goal without any issues. I've built a pile of titles on my shelf (and my Kindle) that I have yet to read. You know what they say: the best way to become a better writer is to become a better reader! Last night, I was scrummaging through my closet and found a book from 2010 that had been all but forgotten. A book titled "How To Be A Writer" by Barbara Baig. In it, she talks about how writing skills aren't things you're born with, but things you develop over time. She believes that to be a good writer, you need to practice regardless of whether you have some natural talent or affinity for it or not. In fact, she believes that 99% of people are writers, they just haven't practiced enough to be effective writers. The book's subtitle is: "Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play," which I found inviting. Sadly, I never finished the book. I don't know why, since it's been a while now (15 years!) but it still had my red bookmark on the page where I had left it all those years ago. Naturally, I want to continue reading it, but I'll have to start from the very beginning now since I've forgotten most of what I read. That's not to say that I didn't find it interesting the first time around. I remember being really enthused to write more after reading the first few chapters. Life happens and sometimes you forget to finish reading a book, even a good one. Nothing wrong with that. And speaking of writing more, I've been writing quite a lot since my last blog post. I've found the secret to overcoming my writer's block, thankfully. It's actually quite simple. The reason I was not able to put words on paper before was because I was making the mistake of putting myself in perfectionist mode instead of creative mode. In fact, this is one of the topics that Barbara focuses on in her book. Here's a rather large segment from page 22 that explains it perfectly: "When we write, we need to use two different mental faculties: one, which we can call the "creative faculty," is the part of the mind that comes up with things to say, with ideas and images and words; the other—let's call it the "critical faculty"—is the part of the mind that evaluates those words and ideas. Most of us were taught to write by following a model of the writing process I call the "one-step"—or the "get-it-right-the-first-time"—model. According to this model, first you figure out what you want to say, then you make an outline, and then you sit down and write. And as you write, what comes out onto the page should be as close to perfect as you can get it. For some writers this model works; for most of us, though, it doesn't work at all — and when it doesn't, we figure that we just can't write, or we're stupid, or possibly both. But why doesn't this model work? When you are trying to get your writing to be "right" the first time, you are forced to use your creative faculty and your critical faculty at the same time. This is a difficult and often dangerous thing to do, because the two faculties can get in each other's way and paralyze you. For instance, your creative faculty says, "Hey, I've got this great idea!" and you start to write it down. But immediately your critical faculty jumps in and says things like, "Oh, that idea will never work," or "You can't say that!" or "That sentence is ungrammatical," or any other of the many things that our critical faculties have been trained to say. And then what happens is a mental short circuit—everything jams, and you end up staring at the page or out the window, you decide this is a great time to get some coffee or do the laundry or walk the dog—or anything except write." And this is why I was so paralyzed when I wanted to write anything (even this blog post). I was trying to judge the words that were coming out of my head before they even had a chance to land on the page. I was criticizing my own work as I was crafting it, which doesn't make sense and is not the right way to do things. So instead, I realized I had to make myself follow a strict code from now on. A code that involves two golden rules while writing a first draft of anything: - 1) Write like no one is going to read your story. - 2) Words are cheap. They don't cost anything. So put as many down as you want. When I took those two rules to heart, something finally clicked inside my head and I was able to write way more than I thought I could in one sitting. The gist of it all is this: in the end, whatever you put down on paper the first time shouldn't really matter to you because you're going to go back and change those things during the editing process anyway. People write garbage all the time, even entire tomes of garbage. And that's because of the second rule: words are cheap. They don't cost anything to put down on paper (or well, your screen if you're writing on a computer). So why should every word hold so much weight? The answer is they shouldn't. First drafts don't really matter because no one is going to read them. Only you will. Even Ernest Hemingway once said: The first draft of anything is s***. So get your story down on the page or your blog post written. Don't hold yourself back. You don't have to produce gold right out of the gate. It's better to simply enter a state of flow and let yourself transfer the contents from your mental space to the physical space (on the page). Don't think about how things align or don't make sense while writing it. Don't think about grammatical errors or how you've been repeating the same word multiple times. That can come later. That's when your critical faculty comes into play. Anyway, that's where I've been improving as a writer. I'm happy so far with the results. Not because the things I've written are now masterpieces and should be read by everyone, but because I'm actually creating content and setting it down somewhere, so that I can chisel it later into something I can share. And the more I do it, the more efficient I become at it. If you're like me and also been stuck in a writer's block lately, I hope those two golden rules will help you.  Thank you for reading. |
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