Thwarting the Inner Censor
There are so many ways to make a writing process work, but the number one way to find what those are is to experiment freely and widely until the pieces fall together.
In the past year, I've taken part in multiple high-paced writing contests in an online writers group I'm in.
The format is generally something like this: a prompt is posted. We have a few days or a week to write a short story, or flash fiction, or a poem to the prompt. At the end of the writing period, we submit all of our works of writing, and then have a week to rate and review all of the submissions.
There are no prizes. There are usually multiple rounds, and you can opt in or out of rounds as you go. The people with the highest ratings are announced, and I skip off on my merry way with a spreadsheet full of feedback for each piece I submitted.
This mode of writing works very well for me, and after multiple rounds of multiple contests, I finally realized why I keep putting myself through the hassle of balancing a high-paced contest with my demanding day job.
It's because drafting so many writings so quickly helps me outrun my inner censor.
Left to my own devices, I'll outline a quick plot arc for a story. I'll start exploring the world and the characters and the scenes. I'll set a realistic wordcount goal for each day. And then, after a few days, I'll convince myself that it's just not good and move on to something else.
If I'm writing a 1,000 word story in two days from a prompt someone else picked for the contest, I don't expect it to be good. I just expect it to be done. I generally plot out the arc on day 1, write out the draft on day 2, and revise and submit on day 3.
Every time I've worked through this contest process, I've ended up with 1-2 stories I trunked and 2-3 stories I thought had promise and rewrote. One of those stories ("The Freedom to Decide"), was published in Factor Four Magazine in December.
Right now, I have three more of these stories in submission-land with different magazines and an anthology.
There are so many hacks to trick the inner censor into leaving me alone. Sometimes I write, "Shitty Rough Draft" on my manuscript. Sometimes I just repeat to myself over and over again, "This is just a draft, it doesn't have to be good." Sometimes I write on my Alphasmart Neo 2 word processor so I can only see a few lines at a time while I draft. In the past, joining a weekly writers group helped me keep up my writing routine because I didn't want to fall out of the group's regular critique rotation.
There are so many ways to make a writing process work, but the number one way to find what those are is to experiment freely and widely until the pieces fall together.
