For me it was advice from Dan Harmon: “Don’t try to prove you’re a good writer, you’ll never write anything. Try to prove you’re a bad writer and you’ll write everything.” Not perfect advice but it really does help me write when I’m being overly critical of my ideas.
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Now this isn’t an advice, but I’m gonna share it anyway.
One of my family members knew that I wrote a lot of stories and poems and told me to stop wasting time writing them.
And when I think about it this way, I stop overthinking my stories and poems because at the end of the day, nobody is reading them except me.
I reached the stage of a (non-fiction) writing project where I had tons of notes, but no sense of what an eventual manuscript might look like. I discovered Zettelkasten and it was a revelation, not because I think it’s the only way to write, but because it was an answer to my precise problem of how to turn a ton of notes into a manuscript. I’m still a long way from being finished with my project, but I can get my pen moving every day and that in itself has been an enormous relief.
@professed @Dungeondaddyd20 I guess this is similar to other answers here (and yours in particular), is to avoid trying to write a big project from the get go. It’s much easier to try to write smaller more manageable stuff (which zettelkasten encourages). At some point you might be able to use the bits you’ve already written for a larger project.
I don’t recall the specific wording, but the best piece of advice for me was something like this:
Don’t try to be a writer. Don’t try to be an author. Just write.
Having an ideal identity which I was constantly and very unfairly measuring myself against prevented me from writing anything at all because before I even got started I knew it wasn’t going to be to the standards of my imaginary avatar. I now allow myself to write a mess because in that mess is some quality stuff which I can extract and expand on, and writing the mess is a lot of fun. I’m currently totally free of an audience I have to conform to, so my writing is totally free from any kind of restrictions other than what I prefer at the moment.
Kind of a numbers game, isn’t it? On top of that there’s the difference between your own taste and whatever taste a potential audience has
Luckily I only write for me; if it was for anyone else I would have stopped!
