Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Starting now... I'll write

“Write poorly.
Suck.
Write Awful.
Terribly.
Frightfully.
Don’t care.
Turn off the inner editor.
Let yourself write.
Let it flow.
Let yourself fail.
Do something crazy.
Write 50,000 words in the month of November.
I did it.
It was fun.
It was insane.
It was 1,667 words per day.
It was possible, but you have to turn off the inner critic off completely.
Just write.
Quickly.
In bursts.
With joy.
If you can’t write, run away.
Come back.
Write again.
Writing is like anything else.
You won’t get good at it immediately.
It’s a craft.
You have to keep getting better.
You don’t get to Julliard unless you practice.
You want to get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice. Practice. Practice ..or give them a lot of money.
Like anything else it takes 10,000 hours to get to mastery.
Just like Malcolm Gladwell says.
So write.
Fail.
Get your thoughts down.
Let it rest.
Let is marinate.
Then edit, but don’t edit as you type.
That just slows the brain down.
Find a daily practice.
For me it’s blogging.
It’s fun.
The more you write the easier it gets.
The more it is a flow, the less a worry.
It’s not for school, it’s not for a grade, it’s just to get your thoughts out there.
You know they want to come out.
So keep at it.
Make it a practice.
Write poorly.
Write awfully.
Write with abandon and it may end up being really really good.”
Colleen Hoover

This is a poem from one of my favorite books, 'Point of Retreat' by Colleen Hoover.  It is what inspired me to start writing... again.  I really enjoyed writing in high school and I have always reverted back to writing during times in my life that were hard or overly good. I always took the time to proof read and make sure my spelling wasn't too embarrassing, but this time I think I'm going to take the advice in this poem and just write.  I'm not going to edit, so I apologizes for anything that is hard to understand or spelled way wrong, but this isn't really for you (sorry) it's for me. 

No comments:

Post a Comment