I’ve been writing an email a day for over three months now. This is email #95. 🤩
Each email is inspired by a prompt from John Bejakovic’s Daily Email Habit. Sometimes I read the prompt and the muse strikes immediately. Other times, I hate it and curse John out. Most times, an idea emerges during my morning movement practice.
In every case, an email gets written, usually in 30 – 45 minutes.
There’s one thing I’ve learned to do that really helps. Without it, writing would take twice as long and I’d probably give up in frustration.
During my morning writing time, I only have one job: WRITE.
No editing. No researching.
And definitely no judging is allowed.
With writing as my only job, what I write doesn’t have to be good or make sense.
All I need to do is make something appear on the page that vaguely reflects the prompt, and then my job is done.
I usually wait two days before reviewing my work. Only then do I get out my metaphorical red pen and edit.
I’m often surprised that what I’ve written isn’t nearly as awful or messy as my judgements insisted it was at the time of writing. Sure, it needs tightening up, but there’s always a kernel or nugget worth sharing.
If you’re writing or creating content, it helps to create a clear separation between your Creator and Editor roles.
Step into your role of Creator fully and let your only job be to create something. Let it be sloppy, inconsistent, unclear, unfiltered. Just create.
Later on, you can put on your Editor hat and shape it into something good.
If you do this, it will more than double your creative capacity, and it makes writing so much more enjoyable.
If you don’t do it…well, you’re subject to the whims of whatever you happen to be thinking and feeling at the moment, which inevitably leads to distraction and wasting your precious time.
I discovered this as a necessity when doing the NaNoWriMo Challenge to write 50,000 words in a month. My goal was 1,677 words per day, and the first few days were utter misery.
Every other sentence was met with judgement, and I knew that if I didn’t change something, I’d never make it to 50,000 words.
So I gave myself permission to write absolute crap. Nonsensical, non-linear, completely mediocre crap.
And it worked! Not needing it to be good and letting my job be to write something, anything, set me free.
I’ve grown to trust the process, and it never lets me down. Even when I’m absolutely convinced that everything I’ve written belongs in the dumpster.
This isn’t only helpful with writing, by the way. It’s effective with anything you’d like to create.
Create now. Clean it up later.
Yours in love and play,
Steph
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