Simple, but not easy.

This past weekend I decided to experiment with free-writing again. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to just sit down with my morning tea, open up a Word doc and let 'er rip.



It's basically just whatever's in my brain first thing - before email or Twitter or Facebook or the rest of the day intrudes. Sometimes it's a couple hundred words. Sometimes I fill up a couple of pages. Either way, it doesn't matter. It's just me, alone with my words. Nobody else ever needs to see it.

It's been a great tool for helping to clear my mind and start the day off fresh. Sometimes you just have to get rid of all that gunk before you can get to the good stuff.

And there's been a lot of good stuff, too. Over the last two days I've free-written a couple of scenes for my new MMA fighter book. They need a lot of editing and fleshing-out, but that's fine. It's a first draft. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be written.

Amazing how it took me five years of writing professionally to come to that realization. I'd always prided myself on being able to edit as I went, even if it made eking out a measly thousand words a day a real chore. I started dreading it so much I'd put off writing until late in the evening, when I was so tired I could barely concentrate. And frankly, it showed. My words had lost all their life and excitement.

I never thought I could turn off my internal editor - she's always been so fucking loud and insistent. But the other day I sat down and said, "Okay, five minutes. Just five minutes of writing down whatever's in my head. No backing up. No editing. GO!"

I won't kid you - it was hard. My internal editor refused to shut up, but I managed to ignore her, because ... well, it's only five minutes, right?

But in that five minutes, I'd produced three hundred words. It would've taken me an hour to do that under normal circumstances, with me going back and correcting misspelled words or polishing dialogue. Once I'd given myself permission to not be perfect, the floodgates in my brain opened, and my words poured out.

I'm still not sure if either of the scenes I've written thus far will make the cut into the final book - one, I think, is destined for my "snippets" file - but at this point, it's all about clearing out that gunk so the good stuff can float to the surface.

I've just gotta keep typing until I get there. :)