MindAndBodyDigest.com

When I was a teenager one of my hobbies was writing. I spent so many hours doing it but I never really got much of anything finished (except when in school when I had to turn completed writing in). The problem was my inner-critic. I wrote so great but I would hit the “backspace” key way too grand. I was afraid that my finished work wouldn’t be good enough for other people to perceive. I spent so many years struggling to write stuff “worthy of being written” and after all of that work I had nothing to show for it. I would write a few sentences and than erase them because I didn’t think they were good enough. Slowly but surely I would get a few pages written, and than something just wouldn’t feel “good” about the work, and into the trash it would go.

A few years ago I found a solution. It may not work for everyone but it certainly works for me and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work for others because the concept at work here impartial plain makes sense. One day I was watching a movie, “Finding Forrester”, and in that movie there are basically two main characters. One is an already successful writer (played by Sean Connery) who has been hiding from the public eye for many years, and the other character is a basketball player with a passion for writing (played by Rob Brown) who discovers the true identity of the established author and ends up becoming his student. In that movie there is a scene where the “student” is struggling with writer’s block and the “teacher” teaches him that the first draft is always written with the heart.

That day I had an epiphany and I realized that by writing the first draft from the heart and not criticising myself for any imperfections in it, I actually got so much written that it was easy enough to edit it later and create it perform sense and sound good. Before than I edited while I wrote. Do what works best for you. For me I found that I “crank out assure” so fast if I write from the heart. This writing your reading now was gibberish before I edited it. But to this point in this article, I’ve been writing for less than ten minutes.

In that movie scene I mentioned, the student is writing but struggling with writer’s block. He is using a typewriter. The teacher yells at him, “PUNCH THE KEYS FOR GOD’S SAKE!”

When the student complies, he actually gets something done. It doesn’t matter how bad that first draft is, as long as there is raw material in it. Editing transforms that raw material into a section of art so to announce.

Once I made the change in the way I wrote the first draft, my writing ability improved right alongside my ability to follow through with completing my writing but that was only the first thing that helped me to get past writer’s block. At the time I was using a boring word processor to do my writing with. Than one day I was reading a self-improvement blog owned by Steve Pavlina (www.StevePavlina.com) and he recommended keeping a journal as a good daily habit to adopt. So I followed his recommendation and I purchased “The Journal 4″ by David RM Software (www.DavidRM.com). Than another level of not-criticising my writing began.

Up until that moment anything I ever wrote was intended to be written for other people to read. I write in my journal everyday, but I free write my “daily entries”, and than I make quality works of my “notebook entries”. When I started writing every day just for the fun of it, than I got even better at writing from the heart and learned even more so how easy it is to edit a bunch of content and get it great than it is to write and edit and write and edit.

By free writing I learned a writing technique I call “branching out”. I call it that because that’s exactly what it is. When you are writing about a topic you are confined to writing about the topic, but in free writing you write about anything you want to. When you write about something, a plan about something might pop into your head, and than you can write about that. Each topic can lead to more branches, and each branch can have more branches. If you branch out when you are free writing, than you have no excuses to not get writing done (just write from the heart – no one has to see your free writing but you).

If you think you don’t have anything to write about, nothing could be further from the truth. Turn on the radio, any station. What does the music make you feel like? Write about it. A phrase used in the song, what does it say, what does it mean? Do you watch TV? Why or why not? What regrets if any do you have in your life? Why do you have them? What can you do to prevent future ones?

You can write about your job that you like or hate. You can write your opinion on anything. You can write about how you have nothing to write about and if you do so I will have just tricked you into proving to yourself that you DO have something to write about. If you write about how you have nothing to write about you just wrote something.

Typewriters are an old technology and in many ways out of date. I don’t own one right now but do plan on getting one soon. The awesomeness of writing with a typewriter is that you can’t erase your writing as you go. This forces you to either put a imprint on the mistakes you make and than re-punch the keys all over again to weed out the “bad apples” OR disregard the mistake and honest sustain on writing. I believe that the best writing someone could ever write is most likely to be written by a typewriter or pen and paper; and than edited later – because writing with a typewriter or pen and paper best forces you to isolate the strongest muscle – the human heart – and I’m not talking about the muscle that pumps blood but I’m talking about the muscle deeper than that – the metaphorical heart. The one that represents human ambition, passion, desire, want, and willingness to work extremely hard to reach for the sky to see what we are made of. That’s human nature. That’s what living is.

Hey, a thought just popped into my mind (branching out in action), and I’m going to take it as a cue to wrap this article up. It’s something said by “Forest Gump” in the movie by the same name, played by actor Tom Hanks. “Forest Gump” is a movie that I have gained so worthy insight into the way I do things from, and it’s motivated me a lot in life. I’m sure it has done the same for so many other people as well. If you haven’t watched it in a long time, maybe you should set out and do so. It has greatly inspired me, and while this has been a tangent from the topic of overcoming writer’s block… I unprejudiced lengthened my article from it, and that is how I write my free-written journal entries. The more I write and finish writing, the easier I have found it to overcome writer’s block in general, whether I am writing something that will be kept private in my journal, or something that will be published like a web article.

Now I could erase that tangent I just made, but it’s evidence of how you can originate writing one thing, and than write more and more, and thus you really have no reason to ever make excuses for why you “can’t” write something. If you were on a mission to stick to a chosen topic, you can always erase your tangent’s later on, but along with them, some of them will be relevant to the original topic.

Writer’s block will bump into even the best and most experienced writers from time to time, but it won’t plague them because they have learned to overcome it. This article was about how I learned to overcome writer’s block and I hope you may have gained some insight from it. If anyone who reads this article ends up struggling less with writer’s block – than I have succeeded. Now here’s the line from “Forest Gump”, “That’s all I have to say about that.”