From Dean Wesley Smith:
he moment you make something “important” you let in critical voice and since it is important, the critical voice will shut you down. That’s why so many of you can’t finish a story or a novel. It becomes important about halfway through, you become afraid to show it when you are done because it might be bad, and you stop.
Critical Voice wins. (Critical voice only has one goal and that is to stop you.)
But I have gotten a number of questions on how to focus on a challenge and not make what you are writing important?
Well simply put, don’t make it important. (Yeah, that helps…)
It is a matter of focus, actually.
When you are thinking of the final product, the book, getting done, all that, your focus is PRODUCT FOCUSED and that is where making something important comes from.
When you are actually in the story, your focus should be on the PROCESS of writing, of keeping it clean, making sure your characters work, your story flows, and the other billion things your creative voice does automatically.
Never think about the final product, just the process of writing and keeping the writing fun.
Writing should be all positive. That is creative voice. When you hear a negative thought, kill it because that is critical voice trying to stop you. If you think something sucks in a story, leave it in the story, your creative voice put it there for a reason, trust it.
You do that enough times and your critical voice knows it can’t get in that way anymore and stops trying and you end up finishing everything you write.
A challenge for some people brings up PRODUCT FOCUS. It takes the focus from having fun telling a story and puts it on how many words did I write, have I written, and in comes critical voice.
So give yourself permission to not care about the number of words, just the story, and promise yourself you will add them all up at the end of the day or the end of the week when you are tired and not one moment before.
Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith
