Find Your Happy Place

One of the things I've learned recently is how easy it is to loose sight of ones inner craftsman. We become discouraged with our writing. We allow the manic nature of day-to-day living to steal away the joy we once found in our writing.

Do not loose hope, my friends!

I would encourage you to secure the border that separates your happy place from the harsh wastelands of rationality. Handcuff the Watcher to a light post just outside the city limits of the creative capitol in your mind. Then go to the steps of your town hall and shout aloud as to how excited you are to write: to create.

Or... perhaps a more practical idea: go to that location where you find the most inspiration and write for a few minutes. Write about how happy writing makes you feel. Write as quickly as you can. Deliver your thoughts to the page with as little filtering as possible.

And if all of life's frustrations have stolen this joy from you, write about how you want to feel when you write. Think about how proud you want to be when some small seed of thought blooms into a matured writing. Remember that, published or not, you are an artist: your words are valuable.

Then when you finish this verbal snapshot of your good-feeling, frame it! If you're like me you may even glean great pleasure from looking at this in its rawest form (sloppy script, misspellings, grammatical errors, and all). If not, feel free to pick out a key phrase or two and write them in your best penmanship on your finest sheet of paper. Now, place it in the aforementioned inspiration location, where you will see it whenever you write.

And when the time comes—and it will—that you begin to feel frustrated or uninspired, look to those words and find your happy place.

The Watcher

In Discovering the Writer Within, Bruce Ballenger and Barry Lane make reference to an entity inside of all of us that they call the watcher. This watcher is the internal critic that can—if left unchecked—take all of the joy out of writing.  Beyond that, it can rob you of any creativity.  It's nasty, and the your success as a writer begins by silencing this beast.

• When you write, write as quickly as you can. Don't allow the watcher enough time to jam your creative process with thoughts of penmanship and spelling and syntax.
• Write whatever you feel like writing. If the ideas that present themselves are disjointed and incoherent, write them down. If you wander off your selected topic, write it down.
• Enjoy yourself. Don't worry about what other people would think if they read your scribbled words; you should write for yourself first and foremost!

There will be a time for editing and criticizing your work, but it is not now. The best of what you will write will likely prove itself to be that which you spent the least amount of time planning out. Think about the most memorable conversations you've had:  weren't the most alarming and intriguing insights birthed from words that were uttered without forethought.

And as for the watcher... eventually he will become a valuable ally to you in the editing process to use when you see fit. But until then, outrun him!