Ugh! Look at that blank page. Curser blinking mockingly, “I’m ready… ready… ready… what’s the hold up?” You are physically unable to write. Frozen. You’ve got writers block!
Fortunately for you this problem is not even real. That’s right, it’s not real. You are still thinking in words (probably something along the lines of, “It was a dark and stormy night… nah, it’s been done… It was a sunny and temperate brunch… ugh”) and this is good news because it means that you can still write.
You still know how to press keys down and in which order to correctly spell out all the words you’re thinking (well maybe not “conscientiously” but that’s what spell-check is for). So there you have it, you are not faced with an INABILITY to write, you are suffering from an attack of confidence.
Don’t be such a baby.
No one is going to read what you write right now. You’ll make sure to that. But you ARE going to write SOMETHING and it’ll go something like this: “I don’t know what to write. None of my ideas are any good. I wanted to write about the struggles of maintaining morality in the hard, wild West, but the only character I can think of looks and sounds exactly like John Wayne. I’m not a writer, writers come up with original characters. My whole book will populate all of Wyoming with 6 foot tall carbon copies of John Wayne, each one being more brave and upstanding than the next.
Hey, there you go. John Wayne shows down with John Wayne to see who’s more brave and righteous…”
Okay, what I just wrote is TERRIBLE. But you know what? I want to write now. I want to write about a land populated exclusively of damsels and heroes with no one to play the bad guy or bartender. Moral: there is no good without evil. It could be fun.
Just start and let the rest take care of itself. My friend Sylvia Plath put it this way: “Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
My pal Scott Adams (the guy who does those “Dilbert” comics) put it this way: “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
And my neighbor’s uncle Ray Bradbury (the sci-fi guy) wrote me a telegram to give to you, it reads: “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”
They all basically say the same thing. What’s stopping you is your doubt about the quality or value of your ideas. Don’t kill them before they get on paper. KILL THEM AFTER! Have NO MERCY on them! But give them a shot at least. They may lead you somewhere unexpected.
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