The Simple Two-Step Process For Destroying Writer's Block and Unlocking Your Creativity

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

The blinking cursor.

The darn blinking cursor.

The scourge of writers everywhere.

Mocking us with it’s unfailing consistency, a trait we would trade nearly anything to acquire.

No One Gets Talker’s Block

The weird thing about writer’s block is that it even exists in the first place.

As Seth Godin puts it in his excellent book The Icarus Deception, “no one ever gets talker’s block.”

When you think about it, every conversation is an act of creativity. It’s writing dialogue on the spot. And it nearly always happens effortlessly.

So why do we always have something to say when looking at another human face but are left grasping for straws when staring at a blinking cursor?

The big difference between talking and writing is that you know in the back of your mind that talk is cheap. Your words are ephemeral, here today and forgotten tomorrow. There’s no pressure to say something profound, you just need to say something.

When it comes to writing, it’s going to be around for a while. It might be judged. It might be seen by many, many people, most of whom you will never meet.

Better not say anything that isn’t worthwhile.

In other words, the trap is that you assign too much importance to what you are doing. You start to censor yourself and soon find that you have nothing left to say.

In order to get past writer’s block, you need to embrace two things: bad ideas and bad writing.

Bad Ideas

How do people come up with good ideas? Do they have some innate creative talent that you don’t posses? Is there a secret formula for creating amazing ideas out of nothing?

If there is a secret, this is it: the way to come up with good ideas is to come up with bad ideas because there’s really no way of knowing if an idea is good or bad until you have a chance to think about it.

Sometimes it just takes a second. Sometimes you’ll realize a week later in the shower that you had been on to something earlier. However long it takes, you aren’t going to get there if you censor yourself before you even get started.

Bestselling author Tim Ferriss is best known for writing The 4-Hour Workweek, but has actually made most of his money through investing in small startups. A few years ago he had a dilemma: the work that investing required was becoming too stressful.

His solution was a difficult one that many people in his situation would have trouble making: he took an indefinite break from investing in startups. He simply walked away from the project that was making him the most money. Most people would never even think to do such a thing. How did the idea come to him?

The answer is through a list of bad ideas. He started listing crazy things that would make no sense to do. Give away all his money. Cut off his hands and feet. Take an indefinite break from investing in startups…wait a minute, that’s actually a good idea…

If you’re stuck with your writing, take 10 minutes to sit down and write a list of 10 bad ideas. 10 bad ideas for a blog post. 10 bad plot ideas for your novel. You get the idea.

What you’ll find is that it’s pretty hard to come up with a list of 10 of anything. The first couple will come easily because the first couple always do. Beyond that, you’ll have to turn on your imagination. Your mind will be forced past the shallow and superficial to explore new alternatives.

You will also be free from the shackles of perfectionism, since there’s no need to show the list to anyone, and since you’re only coming up with “bad” ideas.

There’s no guarantee that for every 10 ideas one of them will be solid gold, but the more you make it a regular habit and spend time coming up with ideas, the more good ideas you will uncover.

Bad Writing

The key to good ideas is bad ideas and the key to good writing is bad writing.

There’s a fascinating parable about an experiment a professor ran of his ceramics class. I’m not even sure whether or not it actually happened. I heard it on on a podcast from someone who read it in a book, etc. Whether or not it’s true in fact, it’s true in a more important sense.

The idea was that on day one, a pottery professor split his class into two groups. The first half would be graded on sheer volume. The just needed to churn out as many pots as possible, and if the combined weight of their pots was at a certain level by the end of the semester, they would get an A.

The second group would be graded on quality, they only needed to turn in one pot, but it needed to be flawless to get an A.

The surprising thing was, all the best pots that semester were produced by the first group who simply got started and learned from their mistakes. They were marked by action from the beginning.

The second group was marked by hesitancy. Paralyzed by thinking about perfection, they were reluctant to take any false steps. Their quality suffered as a result.

When it comes to writing, quality comes from two places:

1️⃣ Quality comes from quantity: practice makes perfect

As Seth Godin says:

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

Or, in the words of Medium legend Benjamin P. Hardy:

Quantity is the most likely path to quality.

2️⃣ Quality comes from refinement: good writing happens at the editing stage

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but your rough draft is supposed to be, well, rough.

The idea of writing a rough draft is to give you the raw material to craft into something good. In the pottery parable, the raw material is the clay. In writing, their is no raw material until you create it out of nothing.

The big implication is that you should make no effort to edit while you are writing. There’s only one goal when writing: get the next sentence out of your head and onto the page.

The sentence can move later. It can change entirely. It can be removed if needed. Worry about fixing it later. Just write the next sentence.

Tim Ferriss has said that his quota for writing is “two crappy pages a day.” That word “crappy” is essential. It means you don’t need to agonize over how bad it is, it’s supposed to be bad.

I’ve actually started calling my rough drafts “crappy first drafts.” The phrase “rough draft” is too common. It’s lost it’s meaning and just means “first draft.” I need a label that reminds me I’m not creating a finished product…yet.

Once I have a crappy draft, the best tool I know of to refine it is to read it out loud like I am delivering it as a speech. If the reading comes effortlessly, the writing is probably okay. If I have trouble reading it out loud or the ideas don’t seem to flow, I need to make changes.

For the most part, I stick to the first path to quality for blog posts. I publish imperfect work and improve over time.

For longer blog posts and books, I stick to the second method, writing something bad and then reading it out loud to try and spot how to make it good.

Conclusion

Bad ideas, bad writing. More ideas, more writing.

Most people don’t have the discipline to come up with bad ideas. Most people never seem to stumble on any good ideas either. Those two things really are related.

Get to work coming up with some bad ideas. I look forward to hearing your good ones.

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