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.
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!
