The Process of Writing Pt3

So now you have your notebook and a world of possibilities in front of you. Everywhere you turn there are ideas, things you could turn into stories or poems or plays, but how do you start? It’s all well and good having a good idea but how do you turn it into a working piece of decent material? The answer is probably a long and complex one and one that many people have spent a long time searching for. The truth is there is no right or wrong way when you start to write. You may find that one of your first drafts of an idea turns out to almost be a finished product, or you may find that it takes ages to define an idea, to work it and finally make it into something resembling a finished piece. Another poet friend of mine can actually take a year on some of his poems, refining and ‘cleaning’ poems till they are in his eyes perfect. I on the other hand find this rather boring and tend to go with the moment when writing. I’ll then spend some time tidying it up and doing a couple of drafts before I feel free to leave it for a while before coming back and seeing if there is anything else i can do with it. Coming back to a piece is brilliant as you really do see it in a different light.

But.. we are skipping ahead of ourselves slightly. Before we come to do all this one thing that we really must do is turn off that little voice in our head that tells us that anything we write or do is rubbish. This little voice is you inner critic and although it is extremely useful at the end of our wiriting process at the very beginning it is not needed and only gets in the way of the creative process.

There are many ways in which you can get rid of this voice, as time goes on you may be able to do it automatically but in the beginning it can seem quite hard to do. But like I said there are some writing activities that you can employ to help. The first is free writing. A lot of psychologists use this technique in finding out their patients inner thoughts but its always used by writers over the world to rid them of their inner critics and also to help them beat writers block. Free writing is when you take a pen and piece of paper an just write. Dont take your pen of the page just write whatever is in your mind. It can be doodles or sinlge words, sentences or phrases. It can be anything, but you’ll notice the more you do it the easier it becomes. What you put down might mean nothing and not make sense but the point is you have written with no consequence and no worries. That is the frame of mind that you need to be in when you start your writing journey.

Lancaster vs Haseler