Throw everything at the wall

The writer Robert Olen-Butler put together a great video course about the writing process for fiction, along with his book From Where You Dream. It’s a must-have on any writer’s bookshelf. He advocates a kind of dreamspace for writing, rather different from ‘stream-of-consciousness’ or free writing.

He is, of course, a fiction writer talking about writing fiction. The goals are different, but I think not as different as we might think: honest, emotionally appealing, and creative.

Tell him he's dreamin'

The way Olen-Butler defines a ‘dreamspace’ is what I find most helpful. It’s a not-fully-conscious state of mind in which the left brain can no longer throttle the flow of the right brain’s ideas.

It’s that pesky left brain that censors us, introducing doubt in a kind of lizard brain self-preservation device that hasn’t evolved with our capacity for creativity. It stops us from bringing our ideas into the world for fear they might cause others to laugh at us or clients to reconsider.

Maybe the left brain/right brain stuff is old hat. But there's definitely stuff happening in our brain that undermines us far more than anyone else could hope to in their wildest, evilest dreams.

As creative people on LinkedIn, we read (and write) a lot about self-doubt, impostor syndrome and creative burnout.

If it's something you have struggled with, as every single valuable creative person has, one way to address it is to stop censoring your mind.

Nobody can, will or should ever see all of our ideas. We should write them down with abandon, safe in the knowledge that they will only leave the page if we choose to share them.

A royal screw-up

Speaking of which, writing on paper is a great idea for many reasons, not least for the catharsis of screwing up bad ideas into balls and throwing them away. Or burning them. Writing on paper is more confronting than on a computer, but it stops that terrible temptation to delete with the press of a key.

Your ideas need air, and that includes the bad ones. When I write, I like to take my time with each sentence. I want each one to be perfect.

When I give in to that temptation, my bad ideas stick around. They live rent-free in my head. They alight on my shoulder and whisper things like “That’s shit, like me” and “You’re out of your depth on this one”. They are exceptions that prove the rule that I have more bad ideas than good ones. They take up positions of power and gorge on my insecurities.

But if I write them down, they lose their power. I can scribble on the faces of bad ideas and render them unrecognisable. I can doodle and mock them, I can ignore them, I can check my progress.

The early creative stages for any bit of copywriting should echo fiction. Yes, it’s a different discipline, and there’s a brief and all that stuff. But they’re creative stages, and the first couple of them need to be freewheeling and unrestrained.

An important truth I like to remind myself of is that most ideas are useless. That's a good thing, being useless: it takes the pressure off. Ideas don't need to do anything until we make them.

Down tools

Self-censorship by any other name would smell like editing. Editing is as important as the idea itself, in the way that a hunk of flint is not an axe without some elbow grease. Editing is not just technicalities, of course. It’s about brutal assessments and judgment and cruel truths and finding diamonds deep in the rough.

Those are all necessary tools to use in the creative process. My advice: don’t be too quick to use them.