Managing Your Writing

Writing is a big deal in many cases, and doing it efficiently sometimes draws a line between winners and losers. In this short post, I look at what bothers me personally about writing.

There is a known model of creative activity. It describes two competing trends in a person's mind: one of creating, building new content, synthesising entities, ...; and the other of criticism, filtering weeds out, checking for all kinds of mistakes, etc. These two processes are clearly reverse-proportional. There is a flexible switch between them, and the position of it determines a lot of your writing process. Both processes are the bread and butter of writing because without one of them, you're either writing crap or nothing.

The art of getting the balance right between creating and filtering it out evades me. I start criticizing my own potential text before it makes its way to the paper (usually, screen). I sit staring at an empty line and evaluating options that don't fit. I wish there was a quick way to loosen the channel of words and let them flow. Alcohol works, but you have to erase everything afterwards because it's just useless, for obvious reasons. Rewriting can help, too.