Five Myths about Writing
That are stopping you from sitting down to write.
We are all writers. We write because it’s human nature to write, we are called to it, from our soul. Writing is a powerful form of meditation and calm and allows us to grab hold of our inner world, connecting us to our insights. Writing brings clarity to the act of living.
After an hour of baring my thoughts, I feel better about whatever it is I’m struggling to understand. Whatever burden I’m carrying is less heavy. My soul is lighter.
Writing organizes my thoughts and lifts my mood when I write daily.
I end a productive writing session more open, more present, and better equipped to handle what is going on around me. My emotional bandwidth gets a reboot, whether I’ve written for an hour or two, or ten minutes.
Everyone should write, we should write because it calls to us, we are all writers whether we call ourselves writers or not.
Myth #1
You have to have huge swaths of time to write to be a writer.
When we love writing, we find time for it. If you don’t have to have an hour or two to write, you can steal minutes when you have a moment and jot down what comes to you.
I have found when I have a time limit to write, I write faster as opposed to having the whole day to write.
Giving yourself a time limit of ten minutes will make you want to write more than the allotted time. I can write about 300 words in ten minutes. Over time, ten minutes a day turns into a book after half of a year.
When you love writing, you find time for it.
Myth #2
You have to make an income from writing to call yourself a writer.
Many of us have the goal of “becoming a writer,” when what makes you a writer is writing. So we come up with a notion that we can only call ourselves a writer if we are paid a monetary sum for our writing. This attitude stops many of us from writing at all. There’s too much pressure even before we’ve developed the habit. We stop before we even start.
You are a writer if you write.
Myth # 3
Sitting down to write is a big deal.
According to Julia Cameron, author of The Writer’s Life, “writing goes so much better when we don’t work at it so much. When we give ourselves permission to hang out on the page.”
Writing should be fun, you’re supposed to enjoy it, write something you’re interested in that you can’t help but write about; find just the right words to describe an experience or a feeling you’ve had.
Putting one word in front of the other to get the sentence and paragraph to tell a story or express your mood is challenging, but also fun.
Cameron adds, “Making writing a big deal tends to make writing difficult.”
Sit down and write.
Myth #4
You can’t edit too much.
Sometimes, you can over-edit. Sometimes, if you revise draft after draft, you lose some of the magic you produced that came through on the first draft.
So many of us try to get our writing just “right” or “perfect” before we hit publish.
We reach for some unachievable perfection that we learned in school. We were taught by our English teachers that good writing is done only one way and has to be structured to be organized. If we write how we were taught, we lose some of our creativity, and we write too carefully. We try to sound smart and add words we would never use that end up making our writing stilted and less enjoyable to the reader.
Myth #5
You have to be in the mood to write.
If I had to be in the mood to write, I would sit down at my laptop maybe once a month. I write every day, and rarely am I in the mood to write.
The feeling only strikes me when I’m about fifteen minutes into writing, and I’ve hit the flow state. It takes a while.
Somedays I struggle more than other days, but I always feel better after I write. And once I get going, I almost always don’t want to stop writing for over an hour.
Cameron says, “We often make the mistake of thinking that we “have” to be in the “right” mood to write. The truth is any mood can be used for writing. Any mood is a good writing mood.”
Sit down and write.
Writing will fill your heart if you let it. It will fill your pages and help to fill your life. — Julie Cameron
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
