I’m pretty sure it’s been a few years since I posted anything on this site. That long duration has a part of me thinking: Well, I can’t go back.
But that’s crazy thinking. There’s no law that says I have to write and post every day or that a years-long hiatus is an immovable obstacle to ever returning to the practice of writing and sharing.
I’m aided in overcoming my crazy thinking by some books that I’ve read in the meantime. First, there’s The Accidental Genius. If I had to distill the book’s main idea into a sentence or two it would be this: write quickly in order to unblock yourself. This is the idea of “freewriting”: writing quickly and without any constraints.
I have come across other writers who have talked about writing quickly as a way to outrun the censor or to get ahead of the inner critic. There’s something to that. There’s something that is very freeing in writing quickly and just letting it come out. There is something very fresh and raw, and therefore interesting, in the words that come out on the screen.
Second, there’s Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow. That book was mentioned in The Accidental Genius, and I already owned it, so I started reading it, prompted by the one book to get into the other, finally. Same kind of idea: write quickly and don’t let yourself stop and revise or have second thoughts. Be OK with generating a bunch of who-knows-what: it might be garbage or it might be gold. You can go back and revise for clarity.