Writing is hard

Why is it so difficult to type words? I know how to spell, I know how to string sentences together to express thoughts. So why do the words come so grudgingly?

I think, for me, the problem is one of caring too much. I want the words to be perfect, to evoke exactly what I’m trying to say, to be free of errors or confusion. When I don’t care so much about what I’m writing, and tell myself I’m just writing ‘for fun’, the words flow freely–and, are not of noticeably less quality than when I agonize over every syllable.

I know this, yet I can’t help but caring, over-analyzing, and fretting over each word.

The key is to find a way to trick myself into not caring about the quality of my work (until editing begins, of course), but that is easier said than done.

I can do it for a while. At first, I start spewing words without a care, but as they start to pile up, I inevitably go back and look over what I’ve done and realize it’s kind of good. Then the care starts to set in. I start worrying about the parts of it that don’t make sense. I start worrying about keeping up the quality, it suddenly becomes important. And once it matters whether it’s good or not, my writing slows to a crawl.

I’m stuck in that crawling stage now. I know, eventually I’ll swing back to not caring. After so long with so little progress I’ll eventually say ‘screw it, I don’t care anymore, I just want this stupid thing finished’ and return to vomiting words. But then, I’ll realize that my vomit is good, and start liking the story again, and grind to a halt again.

Is the trick simply to not read what I’m writing? I don’t know if I can manage that, since I have a pretty terrible memory and have to check what I named characters or places fairly often. But maybe that is part of the key.

I know there must be a way to trick myself into staying in the word-vomit phase. If I can discover it… it could be the secret key to fantastical success!

How do you do it?