In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* I expect the novel will wrap today
* Topic: Recognizing the Critical Voice
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
I had a pretty good day of writing yesterday once I pried my head out of my butt and realized what was screwing me up: the conscious, critical mind. It’s always the conscious, critical mind. Always. Every time.
As an added bonus, I think the novel’s going to wrap today. All that was required was that I stop worrying about it. Can’t believe I made such a rookie mistake. (grin)
I even wrote a book titled Quiet the Critical Voice (and Write Fiction).
But notice I said “quiet” the critical voice. You probably won’t ever shut it out completely. At least I haven’t, obviously.
In light of this time-sucking faux pas (I lost two whole days to it), I decided to post the following excerpt from the introduction of my book. I hope it will help:
Topic: Recognizing the Critical Voice
if you find yourself being critical (negative), that’s the critical voice.
You’ve been taking in Story (and telling stories) since you were too young to even be aware there was an alphabet, so a long time before you began to commit words to paper. What you learned from taking in Story and from telling stories seeped into your subconscious. It’s waiting there for you to tap into it.
Consider, later, in school at various levels, you were taught to capitalize the first word of sentences and to dot the lower-case I and cross the T and put a period or a question mark at the end of a sentence.
So you do those things automatically. Without “thinking” about it. Which means without evoking the conscious, critical mind.
Likewise, once you learn to trust yourself and let go of all the negative thoughts and delaying tactics, you can engage your creative subconscious and Just Write.
Don’t focus on how many times you used “that” vs. “which” (they aren’t interchangeable anyway).
But wait. You say capitalizing the first word of a sentence and putting a period at the end DOES come naturally but the various parts of telling a story don’t?
That’s because you were taught that they don’t. You were taught to double-check yourself and second-guess your work. You were taught to not trust your creative subconscious.
Now, if you want to be a writer—and more importantly, if you want to actually enjoy being a writer—you have to let all that negativity go.
You have to learn to trust yourself.
And you have to learn to quiet your critical voice.
In every case, the urgings that come from the critical mind are based on fear. They are always, always negative.
The simplest fears are stated bluntly by the critical voice: “I can’t do this” or “Writing a novel is overwhelming” or “What was I thinking?” or “Maybe someday” or “No way can I get published anyway.” (These thoughts are often accompanied by the aforementioned sweaty palms and/or hives.)
The majority of would-be writers are stopped cold by these fears alone.
But the more common fears lie in wait for writers who get beyond those simplest ones and decide to actually write. These critical-mind stumbling blocks are a little more complex and a lot less straightforward.
Most of the time they’re difficult to recognize because they’re disguised as delays (as opposed to outright refusal to allow you to write or reinforcement of the outright certainty that you “can’t”).
But the result is the same: Your manuscript remains in your mind, unwritten.
Or you’ve started it and it lays in a drawer or remains in your computer, unfinished.
Or you’ve finished it but it remains unsubmitted and unpublished.
The critical voice has new tricks for each level of this journey. I’ll look at each level and help you recognize as many of the tricks as possible.
But let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say you want to write a novel. And let’s say you’ve gotten past all the “I can’t do this” stuff. You actually sat down at your computer and put your fingers on the keyboard.
Now you’ve entered the realm of the “Prep Delays.” What are those?
I’ll be back with Chapter 1 to tell you.
But fair warning—your own critical voice will pop up from time to time as you continue reading. And it will always have negative messages, mostly reasons not to keep reading.
* This is way too easy. It has to be BS. All I have to do is let go and trust myself? No way will that work.
* Well sure, maybe this works for him, but look at how long he’s been writing! Look how many books he’s written! And I’m only a beginner. This could never work for me.
* And so on.
All I can tell you is this: I had exactly the same thoughts when I first learned some of the techniques I’ll mention later in this book. The thing is, I didn’t dismiss them out of hand. I tried them.
And they worked.
Just remember, your critical mind isn’t protecting you from new ideas. It’s protecting you from learning ways to shut it up.
Okay, that’s the excerpt. Now I’m gonna go play with my characters.
By the way, nothing in “Of Interest” again today. In my daily rounds, I found only things that have nothing to do with writing or (in one case) horrible advice.
And I vow, in this Journal, first to do no harm. I’ll never write or pass along any information that I believe will harm your writing craft in any way.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Nada.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 950 words
Writing of The Journey Home: Part 9 (novel)
Day 1…… 2019 words. Total words to date…… 2019
Day 2…… 3650 words. Total words to date…… 5669
Day 3…… 3760 words. Total words to date…… 9429
Day 4…… 2834 words. Total words to date…… 12263
Day 5…… 2959 words. Total words to date…… 15222
Day 6…… 3394 words. Total words to date…… 18616
Day 7…… 2727 words. Total words to date…… 21343
Day 8…… 3436 words. Total words to date…… 24779
Day 9…… 4043 words. Total words to date…… 28822
Day 10… 2558 words. Total words to date…… 31380
Day 11… 7097 words. Total words to date…… 38477
Day 12… 4077 words. Total words to date…… 42554
Day 13… 4953 words. Total words to date…… 47507
Total fiction words for March……… 84495
Total fiction words for the year………… 283503
Total nonfiction words for March… 21370
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 67400
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 350903
Calendar Year 2021 Novels to Date…………………… 5
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… X
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 59
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31
Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.