How to Start Letting Your Creativity Flow While Writing?
I love my new 2-step writing method.
My head is spinning with a gazillion stories to write about. It’s not the ideas that don’t come up. There’s something else to it.
Perfectionism perhaps sounds like a cliché thing to say during a job interview, but I’m not a fan of this quality. At all. More often than not it feels like someone is watching over my shoulder when I do anything creative. Causing a blockage. Ending up not creating freely.
And what’s the best way to write creatively?
That’s right. To write like nobody’s watching.
I’ve been active on Medium for a bit over a month. Those 7 published articles you see in the screenshot above have cost me a ton of effort. Especially:
- this article (aaa I was so excited it got published in Better Humans) and
- this article (publishing in Taking Off has been an amazing and supportive experience, KL Simmons is co-hosting a fantastic publication there!).
I’ve spent days on writing, editing, removing paragraphs, adding tags, removing tags, linking to sources, finding the right publication. And I’m guilty of editing after publishing.
That’s super time-consuming.
The past two weeks, pressing the publish button became one of the scariest, and at the same time most exciting, things to do.
Because I grew a bit anxious for that button, I started to feel more and more limited in my creativity. I started writing with a filter, thinking about the audience.
The thing is… this doesn’t allow the flow of writing to present itself.
I write because I enjoy it. To make my head empty. To get in the flow. To expand my English vocabulary. To be able to convey stories better. To connect with writers and readers across the world.
And I know: to let go of the filter and to just write will improve all those areas above significantly. It has nothing to do with publishing The Best Article of All Time Without Any Grandma Mistakes (I loved that brain fart).
The publish button is your friend! Hit it!
He’s completely right!
So, what to do?
The drafts were staring at me the other day.
I started saying titles out loud from an upcoming travel series to my partner. Maybe he can pick one to start with?
Especially in terms of those travel stories, I was clueless about where to start. When I start on one story, many substories come up. I click that inviting ‘Write a story’ button again, put a title, an introduction, and repeat.
My partner said: why don’t you start at the beginning?
What a fantastic idea.
Step 1: Answer two questions
The question that I should keep asking myself when I start writing is: What is the story I want to tell and where does it begin?
By answering these two questions, 3/4 of the story is on the paper. And that’s the core.
The fries are the core of the story. All the extras— editing, making pretty, organizing, adding a banging intro, etc — is mayonnaise. It’s about the fries. The mayonnaise doesn’t come on its own.
Step 2: Write like nobody’s watching
See your stories as warmups.
Khadejah pointed that out very well. By doing that I can keep reminding myself to write like nobody’s watching. Removing the filter. It’s only a warmup, right?
Have a break between writing the warmup and editing and there you have it: a published article.
If I keep these two steps in mind, I know the flow will be there :)
Thank you all for reading. As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts!
Here I like to give a special shout-out to Alex Karan for writing such wonderful and helpful articles about expressive writing. His writings have been very insightful to me. Thank you, Alex!
Other stories by me:
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