As an artist (technically, non-practicing) I found this to be extremely relatable, even across fields. In my journey to try and create more, at one point, I crossed a barrier where I needed to allow myself to make "ugly, bad, art" and within that space, I discovered the fun again. How much have we lost by becoming so serious, so hard on ourselve..? Thank you for sharing the wisdom that your journey brought.
I've mentioned this to a couple people in the comments but one of the major "pivot' points in my own journey is when I called up my brother and asked him to tell me, plainly and honestly, what my biggest character fault was--i.e. the thing that was holding me back.
He thought about it for a moment and then said, matter of factly, "You're too hard on yourself."
Normally I would have dismissed that advice, but that time around, I listened. It took a couple years for it to change things properly but in retrospect It was profoundly useful.
May I (kindly) ask, how in the hell did you go about exorcising that demon?
That’s probably my biggest flaw too, and it leeches all the satisfaction and freedom to experience joy in my life. Last Friday I organized an equinox gathering to try and build community and collectively hope and imagine a new world when we’re all feeling downtrodden by the things going on, like thirty people came and shared games and the tea I made and meditated, and I haven’t been able to take satisfaction or success. I’ve just been being so critical for not being able to facilitate the conversation better, which was my main goal (my first time trying to with a group that large too).
In the same vein, I’ve been taking everything so serious, approaching creative ideas and even things that feel nourishing with the lens of “that’s not good enough, what’s the point?, it needs to be better, more fleshed out, more original, more rooted, more radicalizing to those I share it with” etc etc.
I realized I’ve been looking at things as needing to be meaningful or impactful, and have not been approaching things from a place of play for joys sake. I had a moment communing with a flood plain forest a couple weeks ago that I was trying to dissect, figure out how to recreate more of that meaning and extract it in a form I can share, pressuring myself, and only last week realized it was because I was having fun! Even in that moment, I was thinking to myself what’s the point of this deep experience if I can’t share it and infect people with it?
It’s clear to me I need to live a different way, not constantly lambasting myself with perfectionism. I want to cultivate a regenerative culture in my mental ecosystem.
Thanks in advance for your perusal of these frustrated questions. Didn’t expect to share this much!
The simple version is that the dialogue in your head is an emulation. Most of what happens inside our head is a copy of the forms and conventions of what happens outside of our head. So when we think of "self-talk," what we actually mean is that a person talking to themselves is mentally simulating each role of an actual conversation, inside their head, almost as if they were on a stage. They do this with complete credulity: they identify with one of the characters in the dialogue in particular as if it was more "them" than others. But it is arbitrary.
Your self-talk has a shape that depends on what conversation you are simulating. In my case it was a dialogue between two people; me and the idiot that I had to abuse into doing things. In the article I call them the "horse" and the "rider" but functionally you can just think of them as two people. George and Lenny, maybe, from that old Steinbeck novel. At any rate, my head was an endless litany of criticism that I directed towards a phantom "me" in a constant bid to exert control. I had so much I wanted to do, and that fucker kept getting in the way, so it was only natural to scream and prod him until he moved so I could do what I wanted.
Once you realize it's an emulation then the obvious thing that comes to mind is, how does the emulation compare to the real thing I'm emulating?
And when I thought about it that way I realized I was treating this emulation in my head infinitely worse than I would treat a friend, a child, a student, a stranger, or even an enemy. I at least respected my enemies. I treated "internal me" like a bug.
The next obvious thing is that you can look at how you interact with real people in order to change the emulation. In my case, I wanted to treat myself as a friend. So I thought about how I treated my friends when they weren't "good enough," when they fucked up, when they failed, when they felt miserable, when they were lagging. And I realized that I had an entire history of love to draw on--I knew intuitively what it felt like to treat people kindly because that's what I did for everybody but me.
So I just started doing exactly that, silently, for the phantom version of me inside my head. I remember the first time I tried it; I had just had a bad day, hadn't gotten nearly as much done as I wanted, I felt miserable, and I was walking across the parking lot toward my car. And I started up the normal abuse, and then, instead of going on with it, I just... caught myself. The way I'd catch myself if I were talking to a real friend and my temper got the better of me.
And then I calmed myself down and asked the "other me" inside my head a question. "Hey, man. Are you okay?"
And he let out a deeply anguished wave of wordless grief, and I knew that I had a lot of work to do. Bug I started, and most of it started with learning to listen to that part of me in my head that I used to abuse, as if I was talking with a person--because, of course, I always was.
I don't always do it right, but that was the point where I lanced the infection. So the gist is, your self-talk is fundamentally the same as your talk with others. There are no special rules that exist just because it happens inside your head. It's a space remarkably similar to external space. If you want to treat yourself better? Think of a friend who you care for and ask yourself how you treat them when they mess up. Do that, inside your head.
Do you even consider it a fuckup to begin with, or do you just laugh it off because you value the person? Do that inside your head. Do you ask them how they're feeling? Do that inside your head. Do you listen to them vent? Do that inside your head. Do you hug them? Do that inside your head. Take the actions that you feel are genuine and natural. Half of the reason we struggle to fix our internal dialogue is because the pat responses we try to use in our heads feel false. So find ones that are true. Do those. Have the talks.
If you can't be kind at first? If feel so full of rage and disappointment that you can't even listen to yourself? Think about the last time you felt that towards someone you loved. Did you abuse them? Or did you catch yourself, choke back anger and tears, and tell them honestly that what they were doing to you was hurting you and you wanted them to stop?
Do that inside your head.
Figure out where you are in the relationship with that phantom "you" (or whatever form it takes) and just do the most right, most loving thing you can do. Inside your head. The same way you would do it if it was a friend outside of your head.
And if it feels a little bit foolish, remind yourself that all those years of internal abuse were just an emulation as well--and yet you sunk into them with complete credulity, treating them as if they were absolutely real, and not an emulation. If that's the case, why should you treat your deliberate choice to be kind inside your head as if it was less real than the years of criticism?
Best wishes. That was the principle that worked for me. Also please note that there were plenty of other things that I did to get out of the worst of my depression, including medication. So this does not magically cure mental illness. But it's a good remedy for being too hard on yourself. ;-)
This piece is an amazing service to a writing community like Substack. I particularly found the metaphor of “dirt” helpful, not just for its meaning (dirt isn’t trash; it’s important and necessary for growth); but also for its practical implications. It’s a great way to visualize multi-pass writing.
Thanks, Brenden. Please let me know if you get anything tangible in terms of new practices from the article; my rule is that the final measure of an article isn't whether it creates a buzz of excitement in readers -- it's whether it positions them to make a sustainable change. I'd love to hear from readers if this helps them smooth out their process in any way.
while writing about (potentially) making art i find it a bit unrespectful to ise AI Art to illustrate it. i think you're analysis is put together very nicely. I'd rather have no picture than some generated stuff though.
I found so much gold here James, thank you. I teaching writing as part of a class on qualitative analysis and will be sharing your post with students. Personally, I was most prolific when I decided to amuse my Facebook friends with my posts. It grew into a blog. I was always thinking about this ‘silly’ writing, jotting ideas and one liners on my phone. My relationship to writing became playful. When I came to do my serious work writing, it was so less intimidating. Thank you for reminding me about this
In my first year of graduate school I hit this deep funk where I felt severely broken, both as a scholar and as a person. I called up my brother because I knew he was kind but also honest, so I trusted him to be able to give me hard feedback gracefully. And I asked him if he could tell me, from his own perspective, what was wrong with me.
His response was "You're too hard on yourself."
Normally I would have dismissed him but I had made a commitment up front to taking whatever he said seriously, so I forced myself to ask the question "What if being hard on myself is the cause of my problems and not the solution?"
It took about three years for that insight to change my life but it did, completely, making me a much happier, much more productive person. Glad to see you've found the secret too.
I’m late to the party here but just want to echo how powerful your reframes and tools are. Thank you!
One tool I’d like to share is to help with the belief “writing should be done right”
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with IFS, but the idea is that we have different parts within us that can dominate our experience and clash with each other.
My internal editor is very strong and it really oppresses my internal creative or inner child. It takes the joy away. But it also plays such a helpful role at the end of the process.
So I just say to myself when I notice it: “thank you for showing up. You’re so important and I value what you want to say, but right now I’d like you to step aside and let the creative have its say. And when we’re finished at the end, come along and have your turn”
Surprisingly, it works (for me at least 😛). It separates that anxiety from the clashing goals.
Being the mildly obsessed notebooks and stationery enthusiast that I am, I noticed that you spoke of "pen and paper" and "notebooks" several times throughout that article.
I can't help but wonder if you ever went into detail about your analog writing tools. If not, I hereby declare my heightened curiosity about that 😁
Easy. Fountain pens and Japanese paper. Too many notebooks to count, unfortunately, but I’ll say that I have a fondness for Rhodia (not Japanese, but spectacular), Moleskine (also not Japanese, but also spectacular), and Midori, Mnemosyne, Kyokuko, and Apica (all Japanese and all superior. The Midori notebooks are the best paper I have ever used).
Pen-wise, the Pilot Cavalier is superior to everything else. But I’m a fan of Lamy, and China has been getting better at their shameless knockoffs. :-D
Pilot’s Iroshizuku inks are probably the best I have. But I’ve got several bottles of Noodler’s ink that I’ve been working on for years and will probably never finish. Noodlers’ Walnut was the first one I bought, back in 2010, and I think I’m just now finishing the bottle.
Do you still carry a notebook with you to take notes on the go? If so: Do you use fountain pens with ink from a bottle in these cases, too?
Forgive me for suggesting another brand (in the unlikely case you never tried it): If you like Moleskine, I promise you'll love Leuchtturm1917 - especially as a fountain pen user.
I admire Leuchtturm but by the time I learned of it the notebook pile had grown so large that I had no desire to buy notebooks for the sake of buying them anymore. Ironically becoming a serious writer dampened my enthusiasm for paper, because it was no longer all joy and no work. These days when I buy notebooks it’s almost entirely because I’ve failed my impulse control for one reason or another.
I will, however, see if I can gently nudge the next impulse failure in the direction of a Leuchtturm notebook. It will likely be at least three or four months from now. :-D
Haha, I know the problem. There should be a version of "Tsundoku" that alludes to collecting much more notebooks than one is ever going to use. ^^
Thankfully, I currently experience the opposite tendency: The more serious I get about writing, the more stages of my writing workflow happen on paper - and I love it. 😊 It's joyfully inefficient - but very effective. And so much more pleasurable than any keyboard (although I really like my Logitech MX Keys).
Joyfully inefficient is a good phrase for it. Another idea, which doesn’t have an easy word—it’s less efficient in terms of how fast I can produce words, but it seems to be more efficient in terms of how fast I can produce work.
That is, if you track it at the level of a single session, typing is much more efficient. But if you track it at the level of the amount done per day, writing gets more—presumably because I don’t get pulled away from my work by the entire internet.
Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you found something helpful here, and hope that it works for you in practice as well--keep at it, and keep me posted!
So right! The number one enemy of writing well is TRYING to write well, and you nail all the whys and ways in which that happens, for example, "When you write you plan, research, compose and edit all at once." What happens? Your anxious, judging, ambitious mind battles against your imaginative, creative, don't-care mind, and wins. Twice a week we host a Prompt of the Week zoom which encourages "throwaway writing" - maybe you'll do something with it, maybe not, and as it's written in 10 minutes the idea that it's supposed to be "good" is absurd. Result: not trying to write well! Result of that: really interesting material that consistently surprises you. Result of that: fun and enjoyment in writing, which carries over to other writing too. The zooms are open to anyone who wants to join us - link at ImaginativeStorm.
This was really helpful, thank you. I've seen a lot of writing advice before and how to get over blocks but not like this. I immediately went and did some aimless mindless free writing and found there were some gems hidden into those words too.
That said, seeing AI work at the end of a piece about writing and human creativity felt like a slap in the face. Now I can't be sure how much of this article is yours and how much of it too comes from AI. It muddies the great advice for me, unfortunately.
Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you found something in the article that resonated with you. Keep me posted to let me know how it works for you in practice.
I'll second Joy's comment. I actually realized that I have a ton of dirt laying around in various places and never even realized that's what I was doing. This whole thing was great though - it's actually a bit relieving for someone who has always wanted to write professionally but has never actually taken much of a step toward it.
Really appreciate how you reframe writing as "dirt management" rather than just composing polished pieces. The image of someone trying to paint a masterpiece one perfect centimeter at a time really drives home how absurd our "get it right the first time" instincts are. Your "stoner draft" technique made me laugh - there's something beautifully subversive about deliberately writing badly to outsmart our inner critic.
I especially connected with your point about treating most writing as invisible groundwork. It's liberating to think that even Gandhi's prolific output is dwarfed by our daily digital scribbling - maybe we're all already writers, just waiting to redirect that natural flow toward what matters to us.
One question: Do you think your academic background helped you develop these insights, or did breaking free from academic writing conventions lead you to them? Either way, this is the kind of practical writing advice that actually addresses the mental warfare behind the blank page. Whoa dude. Totally righteous. 😉
What a wonderful article! You had me hooked from the beginning with dismissing the “just write” advice. Thank you for breaking it down into manageable, understandable steps. I am just beginning to develop a disciplined writing habit, and your article helped me understand some of the barriers that prevent me from being consistent. I very much appreciate your guidance and have saved this article to reference again.
Thank you for the kind words. Based on the response to this article I've decided that I'll be writing more about writing from here on out--it seems like some of the things that worked for me are resonating with other people. Best wishes to you going forward!
Regrettably, I am, indeed, about to become one of those writers who writes about writing for other writers. But my hope is that I'll at least be useful while doing it.
This fell into my suggested feed and I am so grateful. You put into words what I couldn’t quite understand - the anxiety, the clashing, the personal bar we set for the work, the internal editor that blocks a good writing day with unnecessary edits. All of it, I thank you!
Thank you for the kind words. I hope that you find it helpful, and if you wind up with any questions about putting it into practice, I'm happy to talk.
Would you say that you can train the ‘inner editor’ or is it more where you eventually become familiar enough to deal with. As someone who’s already a hyper-focused perfectionist, it takes the reigns during writing more often than I’d like. I don’t mind it as much during non-fiction, but it puts the fire out of creative writing.
Honestly? For me, there are slightly different solutions for fiction and nonfiction, and I primarily write nonfiction. But they're both built on the same principle.
The idea is this: the thing that gums you up is that when you're writing you're actually engaging in three or four contradictory mental tasks at the same time. With fiction, for example, if you start a chapter from scratch and just try to write it from beginning to end, you're doing at least four things:
1) Trying to figure out how the story fits together at the meta-level.
2) Trying to figure out what your characters do in a scene.
3) Trying to compose text.
4) Trying to edit text.
For me the trick to writing was separating these levels so that I minimize the number of things I'm doing at once. You can do this by separating the editor and the story, for example--instead of sitting down and just writing "the story," try to sit down and write a "progression of events" instead--a sort of quasi-story, but one that is (by definition) provisional.
I stumbled across this completely by accident. I was struggling with a chapter of a story and it was on the backburner, but one day in class I got bored with the material so I opened up my notebook and figured I'd just script what I wanted the characters to say. I wrote about ten pages of script, dialogue only, with notes on actions and scenes. The next day I started typing it and wound up writing about 8000 words in one sitting with almost no mental friction. I used the "hollywood script" approach when writing fiction from that point onward.
Your solution may be different than mine but I think the principle is that you have to find ways to do two passes: one is more about determining what happens, the second is about writing "the story" in a form that you're prepared for others to see.
So to answer your question more directly, I do think you can train "the editor," but in order for it to work you really need to make space for it. You do that by finding a way to get comfortable writing provisional text--stuff that's meant to hold the place for you so that you can come back and do a second pass later. If you're committed to doing the whole thing in a single pass then most people will struggle to "train" their editor to be silent, because it has a job to do, and your internal editor takes that job seriously--it will force itself to the forefront if you haven't created a space for it.
Thanks! I think having a better understanding of the battle between the ‘editor’ and ‘creative’ is helping not feel like I’m in constant opposition of myself, I just need to do some bargaining or employ some manipulative tactics. I did try the most dangerous writing app. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen 😆
As an artist (technically, non-practicing) I found this to be extremely relatable, even across fields. In my journey to try and create more, at one point, I crossed a barrier where I needed to allow myself to make "ugly, bad, art" and within that space, I discovered the fun again. How much have we lost by becoming so serious, so hard on ourselve..? Thank you for sharing the wisdom that your journey brought.
Xenia,
I've mentioned this to a couple people in the comments but one of the major "pivot' points in my own journey is when I called up my brother and asked him to tell me, plainly and honestly, what my biggest character fault was--i.e. the thing that was holding me back.
He thought about it for a moment and then said, matter of factly, "You're too hard on yourself."
Normally I would have dismissed that advice, but that time around, I listened. It took a couple years for it to change things properly but in retrospect It was profoundly useful.
James
May I (kindly) ask, how in the hell did you go about exorcising that demon?
That’s probably my biggest flaw too, and it leeches all the satisfaction and freedom to experience joy in my life. Last Friday I organized an equinox gathering to try and build community and collectively hope and imagine a new world when we’re all feeling downtrodden by the things going on, like thirty people came and shared games and the tea I made and meditated, and I haven’t been able to take satisfaction or success. I’ve just been being so critical for not being able to facilitate the conversation better, which was my main goal (my first time trying to with a group that large too).
In the same vein, I’ve been taking everything so serious, approaching creative ideas and even things that feel nourishing with the lens of “that’s not good enough, what’s the point?, it needs to be better, more fleshed out, more original, more rooted, more radicalizing to those I share it with” etc etc.
I realized I’ve been looking at things as needing to be meaningful or impactful, and have not been approaching things from a place of play for joys sake. I had a moment communing with a flood plain forest a couple weeks ago that I was trying to dissect, figure out how to recreate more of that meaning and extract it in a form I can share, pressuring myself, and only last week realized it was because I was having fun! Even in that moment, I was thinking to myself what’s the point of this deep experience if I can’t share it and infect people with it?
It’s clear to me I need to live a different way, not constantly lambasting myself with perfectionism. I want to cultivate a regenerative culture in my mental ecosystem.
Thanks in advance for your perusal of these frustrated questions. Didn’t expect to share this much!
GB,
I wrote at length about this in an article in the past. I'm linking it here for you.
https://medium.com/invisible-illness/the-theater-of-the-mind-d59312a336ba?sk=1dc33675cf800f848ba8d6066bdf0f0d
The simple version is that the dialogue in your head is an emulation. Most of what happens inside our head is a copy of the forms and conventions of what happens outside of our head. So when we think of "self-talk," what we actually mean is that a person talking to themselves is mentally simulating each role of an actual conversation, inside their head, almost as if they were on a stage. They do this with complete credulity: they identify with one of the characters in the dialogue in particular as if it was more "them" than others. But it is arbitrary.
Your self-talk has a shape that depends on what conversation you are simulating. In my case it was a dialogue between two people; me and the idiot that I had to abuse into doing things. In the article I call them the "horse" and the "rider" but functionally you can just think of them as two people. George and Lenny, maybe, from that old Steinbeck novel. At any rate, my head was an endless litany of criticism that I directed towards a phantom "me" in a constant bid to exert control. I had so much I wanted to do, and that fucker kept getting in the way, so it was only natural to scream and prod him until he moved so I could do what I wanted.
Once you realize it's an emulation then the obvious thing that comes to mind is, how does the emulation compare to the real thing I'm emulating?
And when I thought about it that way I realized I was treating this emulation in my head infinitely worse than I would treat a friend, a child, a student, a stranger, or even an enemy. I at least respected my enemies. I treated "internal me" like a bug.
The next obvious thing is that you can look at how you interact with real people in order to change the emulation. In my case, I wanted to treat myself as a friend. So I thought about how I treated my friends when they weren't "good enough," when they fucked up, when they failed, when they felt miserable, when they were lagging. And I realized that I had an entire history of love to draw on--I knew intuitively what it felt like to treat people kindly because that's what I did for everybody but me.
So I just started doing exactly that, silently, for the phantom version of me inside my head. I remember the first time I tried it; I had just had a bad day, hadn't gotten nearly as much done as I wanted, I felt miserable, and I was walking across the parking lot toward my car. And I started up the normal abuse, and then, instead of going on with it, I just... caught myself. The way I'd catch myself if I were talking to a real friend and my temper got the better of me.
And then I calmed myself down and asked the "other me" inside my head a question. "Hey, man. Are you okay?"
And he let out a deeply anguished wave of wordless grief, and I knew that I had a lot of work to do. Bug I started, and most of it started with learning to listen to that part of me in my head that I used to abuse, as if I was talking with a person--because, of course, I always was.
I don't always do it right, but that was the point where I lanced the infection. So the gist is, your self-talk is fundamentally the same as your talk with others. There are no special rules that exist just because it happens inside your head. It's a space remarkably similar to external space. If you want to treat yourself better? Think of a friend who you care for and ask yourself how you treat them when they mess up. Do that, inside your head.
Do you even consider it a fuckup to begin with, or do you just laugh it off because you value the person? Do that inside your head. Do you ask them how they're feeling? Do that inside your head. Do you listen to them vent? Do that inside your head. Do you hug them? Do that inside your head. Take the actions that you feel are genuine and natural. Half of the reason we struggle to fix our internal dialogue is because the pat responses we try to use in our heads feel false. So find ones that are true. Do those. Have the talks.
If you can't be kind at first? If feel so full of rage and disappointment that you can't even listen to yourself? Think about the last time you felt that towards someone you loved. Did you abuse them? Or did you catch yourself, choke back anger and tears, and tell them honestly that what they were doing to you was hurting you and you wanted them to stop?
Do that inside your head.
Figure out where you are in the relationship with that phantom "you" (or whatever form it takes) and just do the most right, most loving thing you can do. Inside your head. The same way you would do it if it was a friend outside of your head.
And if it feels a little bit foolish, remind yourself that all those years of internal abuse were just an emulation as well--and yet you sunk into them with complete credulity, treating them as if they were absolutely real, and not an emulation. If that's the case, why should you treat your deliberate choice to be kind inside your head as if it was less real than the years of criticism?
Best wishes. That was the principle that worked for me. Also please note that there were plenty of other things that I did to get out of the worst of my depression, including medication. So this does not magically cure mental illness. But it's a good remedy for being too hard on yourself. ;-)
J
That’s what happened when I started doing “throwaway writing.” I might try “stoner writing” inspired by this piece!
This piece is an amazing service to a writing community like Substack. I particularly found the metaphor of “dirt” helpful, not just for its meaning (dirt isn’t trash; it’s important and necessary for growth); but also for its practical implications. It’s a great way to visualize multi-pass writing.
Thanks, Brenden. Please let me know if you get anything tangible in terms of new practices from the article; my rule is that the final measure of an article isn't whether it creates a buzz of excitement in readers -- it's whether it positions them to make a sustainable change. I'd love to hear from readers if this helps them smooth out their process in any way.
Boooo you suck for using AI. Is it so hard to get an image with creative commons licensing?
Agreed. Such a lazy attitude.
You make some good points well, but I won’t restack this as you have used AI generated images.
Do you know whose copyright artwork Midjourney was trained on? I don’t but am sure they weren’t paid for use of their work.
while writing about (potentially) making art i find it a bit unrespectful to ise AI Art to illustrate it. i think you're analysis is put together very nicely. I'd rather have no picture than some generated stuff though.
I found so much gold here James, thank you. I teaching writing as part of a class on qualitative analysis and will be sharing your post with students. Personally, I was most prolific when I decided to amuse my Facebook friends with my posts. It grew into a blog. I was always thinking about this ‘silly’ writing, jotting ideas and one liners on my phone. My relationship to writing became playful. When I came to do my serious work writing, it was so less intimidating. Thank you for reminding me about this
Julie,
In my first year of graduate school I hit this deep funk where I felt severely broken, both as a scholar and as a person. I called up my brother because I knew he was kind but also honest, so I trusted him to be able to give me hard feedback gracefully. And I asked him if he could tell me, from his own perspective, what was wrong with me.
His response was "You're too hard on yourself."
Normally I would have dismissed him but I had made a commitment up front to taking whatever he said seriously, so I forced myself to ask the question "What if being hard on myself is the cause of my problems and not the solution?"
It took about three years for that insight to change my life but it did, completely, making me a much happier, much more productive person. Glad to see you've found the secret too.
James
I totally relate to your comment James and it has been such a struggle — my sister said the same thing to me too!
Same. Facebook but no blog.
I’m late to the party here but just want to echo how powerful your reframes and tools are. Thank you!
One tool I’d like to share is to help with the belief “writing should be done right”
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with IFS, but the idea is that we have different parts within us that can dominate our experience and clash with each other.
My internal editor is very strong and it really oppresses my internal creative or inner child. It takes the joy away. But it also plays such a helpful role at the end of the process.
So I just say to myself when I notice it: “thank you for showing up. You’re so important and I value what you want to say, but right now I’d like you to step aside and let the creative have its say. And when we’re finished at the end, come along and have your turn”
Surprisingly, it works (for me at least 😛). It separates that anxiety from the clashing goals.
Being the mildly obsessed notebooks and stationery enthusiast that I am, I noticed that you spoke of "pen and paper" and "notebooks" several times throughout that article.
I can't help but wonder if you ever went into detail about your analog writing tools. If not, I hereby declare my heightened curiosity about that 😁
Easy. Fountain pens and Japanese paper. Too many notebooks to count, unfortunately, but I’ll say that I have a fondness for Rhodia (not Japanese, but spectacular), Moleskine (also not Japanese, but also spectacular), and Midori, Mnemosyne, Kyokuko, and Apica (all Japanese and all superior. The Midori notebooks are the best paper I have ever used).
Pen-wise, the Pilot Cavalier is superior to everything else. But I’m a fan of Lamy, and China has been getting better at their shameless knockoffs. :-D
Pilot’s Iroshizuku inks are probably the best I have. But I’ve got several bottles of Noodler’s ink that I’ve been working on for years and will probably never finish. Noodlers’ Walnut was the first one I bought, back in 2010, and I think I’m just now finishing the bottle.
Thanks for the instant reply!
Do you still carry a notebook with you to take notes on the go? If so: Do you use fountain pens with ink from a bottle in these cases, too?
Forgive me for suggesting another brand (in the unlikely case you never tried it): If you like Moleskine, I promise you'll love Leuchtturm1917 - especially as a fountain pen user.
I admire Leuchtturm but by the time I learned of it the notebook pile had grown so large that I had no desire to buy notebooks for the sake of buying them anymore. Ironically becoming a serious writer dampened my enthusiasm for paper, because it was no longer all joy and no work. These days when I buy notebooks it’s almost entirely because I’ve failed my impulse control for one reason or another.
I will, however, see if I can gently nudge the next impulse failure in the direction of a Leuchtturm notebook. It will likely be at least three or four months from now. :-D
Haha, I know the problem. There should be a version of "Tsundoku" that alludes to collecting much more notebooks than one is ever going to use. ^^
Thankfully, I currently experience the opposite tendency: The more serious I get about writing, the more stages of my writing workflow happen on paper - and I love it. 😊 It's joyfully inefficient - but very effective. And so much more pleasurable than any keyboard (although I really like my Logitech MX Keys).
Joyfully inefficient is a good phrase for it. Another idea, which doesn’t have an easy word—it’s less efficient in terms of how fast I can produce words, but it seems to be more efficient in terms of how fast I can produce work.
That is, if you track it at the level of a single session, typing is much more efficient. But if you track it at the level of the amount done per day, writing gets more—presumably because I don’t get pulled away from my work by the entire internet.
Thank you for going further than the common “just write” advice and breaking it down for those of us still struggling with a daily writing practice.
Hearing that I’m already a prolific writer is immensely helpful and validating. Thank you!
Ally,
Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you found something helpful here, and hope that it works for you in practice as well--keep at it, and keep me posted!
James
Holy crap this is one of the best things I've come across. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Isaiah!
Glad to hear that you found this helpful. Keep me posted on how the writing goes!
James
So right! The number one enemy of writing well is TRYING to write well, and you nail all the whys and ways in which that happens, for example, "When you write you plan, research, compose and edit all at once." What happens? Your anxious, judging, ambitious mind battles against your imaginative, creative, don't-care mind, and wins. Twice a week we host a Prompt of the Week zoom which encourages "throwaway writing" - maybe you'll do something with it, maybe not, and as it's written in 10 minutes the idea that it's supposed to be "good" is absurd. Result: not trying to write well! Result of that: really interesting material that consistently surprises you. Result of that: fun and enjoyment in writing, which carries over to other writing too. The zooms are open to anyone who wants to join us - link at ImaginativeStorm.
This was really helpful, thank you. I've seen a lot of writing advice before and how to get over blocks but not like this. I immediately went and did some aimless mindless free writing and found there were some gems hidden into those words too.
That said, seeing AI work at the end of a piece about writing and human creativity felt like a slap in the face. Now I can't be sure how much of this article is yours and how much of it too comes from AI. It muddies the great advice for me, unfortunately.
I love the metaphor of the “dirt” needed to grow
plants! I’ll think of that whenever I sit down to write something.
Joy,
Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you found something in the article that resonated with you. Keep me posted to let me know how it works for you in practice.
James
I'll second Joy's comment. I actually realized that I have a ton of dirt laying around in various places and never even realized that's what I was doing. This whole thing was great though - it's actually a bit relieving for someone who has always wanted to write professionally but has never actually taken much of a step toward it.
Really appreciate how you reframe writing as "dirt management" rather than just composing polished pieces. The image of someone trying to paint a masterpiece one perfect centimeter at a time really drives home how absurd our "get it right the first time" instincts are. Your "stoner draft" technique made me laugh - there's something beautifully subversive about deliberately writing badly to outsmart our inner critic.
I especially connected with your point about treating most writing as invisible groundwork. It's liberating to think that even Gandhi's prolific output is dwarfed by our daily digital scribbling - maybe we're all already writers, just waiting to redirect that natural flow toward what matters to us.
One question: Do you think your academic background helped you develop these insights, or did breaking free from academic writing conventions lead you to them? Either way, this is the kind of practical writing advice that actually addresses the mental warfare behind the blank page. Whoa dude. Totally righteous. 😉
What a wonderful article! You had me hooked from the beginning with dismissing the “just write” advice. Thank you for breaking it down into manageable, understandable steps. I am just beginning to develop a disciplined writing habit, and your article helped me understand some of the barriers that prevent me from being consistent. I very much appreciate your guidance and have saved this article to reference again.
Emily,
Thank you for the kind words. Based on the response to this article I've decided that I'll be writing more about writing from here on out--it seems like some of the things that worked for me are resonating with other people. Best wishes to you going forward!
James
Usually, I'm not the greatest fan of writers writing about writing to other writers.
But I have to admit: Of all the writing advice I've consumed over the years, this article is among the best pieces. Bravo! 👍
I'll re-read this several times for sure.
Felix,
Regrettably, I am, indeed, about to become one of those writers who writes about writing for other writers. But my hope is that I'll at least be useful while doing it.
James
This fell into my suggested feed and I am so grateful. You put into words what I couldn’t quite understand - the anxiety, the clashing, the personal bar we set for the work, the internal editor that blocks a good writing day with unnecessary edits. All of it, I thank you!
Samantha,
Thank you for the kind words. I hope that you find it helpful, and if you wind up with any questions about putting it into practice, I'm happy to talk.
James
Would you say that you can train the ‘inner editor’ or is it more where you eventually become familiar enough to deal with. As someone who’s already a hyper-focused perfectionist, it takes the reigns during writing more often than I’d like. I don’t mind it as much during non-fiction, but it puts the fire out of creative writing.
Honestly? For me, there are slightly different solutions for fiction and nonfiction, and I primarily write nonfiction. But they're both built on the same principle.
The idea is this: the thing that gums you up is that when you're writing you're actually engaging in three or four contradictory mental tasks at the same time. With fiction, for example, if you start a chapter from scratch and just try to write it from beginning to end, you're doing at least four things:
1) Trying to figure out how the story fits together at the meta-level.
2) Trying to figure out what your characters do in a scene.
3) Trying to compose text.
4) Trying to edit text.
For me the trick to writing was separating these levels so that I minimize the number of things I'm doing at once. You can do this by separating the editor and the story, for example--instead of sitting down and just writing "the story," try to sit down and write a "progression of events" instead--a sort of quasi-story, but one that is (by definition) provisional.
I stumbled across this completely by accident. I was struggling with a chapter of a story and it was on the backburner, but one day in class I got bored with the material so I opened up my notebook and figured I'd just script what I wanted the characters to say. I wrote about ten pages of script, dialogue only, with notes on actions and scenes. The next day I started typing it and wound up writing about 8000 words in one sitting with almost no mental friction. I used the "hollywood script" approach when writing fiction from that point onward.
Your solution may be different than mine but I think the principle is that you have to find ways to do two passes: one is more about determining what happens, the second is about writing "the story" in a form that you're prepared for others to see.
So to answer your question more directly, I do think you can train "the editor," but in order for it to work you really need to make space for it. You do that by finding a way to get comfortable writing provisional text--stuff that's meant to hold the place for you so that you can come back and do a second pass later. If you're committed to doing the whole thing in a single pass then most people will struggle to "train" their editor to be silent, because it has a job to do, and your internal editor takes that job seriously--it will force itself to the forefront if you haven't created a space for it.
Thanks! I think having a better understanding of the battle between the ‘editor’ and ‘creative’ is helping not feel like I’m in constant opposition of myself, I just need to do some bargaining or employ some manipulative tactics. I did try the most dangerous writing app. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen 😆