I used to suffer from writer’s block badly.
It was so bad that, in 2011, I got frustratingly blocked writing a fan fiction.
Why was it so frustrating?
A fan fiction has almost everything laid out for me so I can simply fill in the gaps with my imagination.
All the hard bits like world building, and character development have already been done.
So it pretty much writes itself.
Until it doesn’t.
The Downward Spiral of Writer’s Block
One of the hardest things about writer’s block is that it seems to become more powerful the longer I go without putting something on the page.
If I get blocked, I don’t feel like I can’t put anything on the page. When nothing is on the page, I get even more blocked.
It becomes as self-fulfilling prophecy.
Before I know it, a week has gone by and I haven’t written a sentence.
Then those weeks string together to form a month-long word drought.
Bad Writing For The Win
In 2011, I entered National Novel Writer’s Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time.
The premise was simple: start writing on November 1st and aim to write at least 50,000 words by November 30th. If you ever tried writing 1,666.66 words every day for a month while working a full-time job, you’ll know that you don’t have time to be a perfectionist or to get writer’s block.
And that’s by design.
The idea is that I would set myself a goal of volume: I would worry about quantity, not quality and free myself from writer’s block.
Seth Godin says “There’s no writer’s block, only fear of bad writing.” (see his excellent blog here)
I was on a mission to conquer my fear of bad writing by writing bad for an entire month.
The Struggle Was Real
I don’t want this to seem like a silver bullet.
It’s not like “I just told myself to write badly and the words flowed from my finger tips.”
It wasn’t like that.
It was still a struggle.
By day 3, I was a few thousand words behind my target.
But at least my word count wasn’t zero.
Instead of a bone-dry word reservoir, I was now getting a trickle of words coming through every day.
And, after a week, that trickle had turned into a stream of words flowing onto the once empty pages.
By the end of November, I had reached the word target with a few hours to spare.
Yes, it was a close one.
But I made it.
And, while the fan fiction didn’t really go anywhere, the momentum from here led me to self-publish Lexicon in 2012 and then The Day I Killed A Man in 2013.
Block: shattered.
Fear of bad writing: conquered.
This experience also taught me a valuable lesson about creativity: to have a trickle of good ideas, I need to have an ocean of bad ideas.
The Bottle Analogy
A simple way of remembering this is the bottle analogy (please help me credit the source if you know it).
Imagine all of your ideas are held in a bottle.
Your good ideas and bad ideas are all mixed together in this bottle.
In order to get the good ideas out of the bottle, you need to pour out the bad ones too.
Allowing the bad ideas to flow out onto the page also helps the good ideas to flow out too!
So, the next time you set out on a creative pursuit, give yourself permission to have bad ideas.
Your best ideas may be only a few bad ideas away!
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