What is this all about, “You are free to write the worst junk?
Sounds like maybe it’s wasting time.
But it’s not – here’s how it works.
Let’s take a non-writing example first and then go from there.
Let’s say that you encounter a puppy or a kitten in a field somewhere. You can tell that the creature is very shy. You also can see that this little creature is possibly injured, but you are not sure, so you would like to get as close as possible. Then, you could examine this kitten or young dog to see if there is something actually wrong that maybe you can help with.
So the first thing you try is to call to it in a standard sort of way like whistling for the dog or saying “here kitty kitty” for the cat.
You notice that neither of these things works. You aren’t making any progress. So then you try some other sorts of vocalizations like clicking your tongue or raising the pitch of your voice or lowering it, speaking more softly or more firmly, just going into as many possibilities as you can think of.
Actually let’s up the ante here in this scenario. This little creature has the key around its neck to your survival shelter and you desperately need that key to keep from starving.
Okay, let’s continue. So you’ve gone through everything that you can think of, all kinds of vocal things, all kinds of gestures and nothing seems to be working. so what are you going to do? Are you going to give up?
No. You are dealing with a wild creature that you don’t know. So the best thing to do in this case is to call on the wild creature that you know is inside yourself.
Maybe you sit down on the ground cross-legged and just start humming. Maybe you reach out one hand and just move a couple fingers slowly and invitingly. Maybe you act like you have a treat in your pocket and another in your hand.
You are tapping into your mind, you are tapping into the situation, you are doing all you can to connect with that little creature that you want to help and that can help you because this little creature has the key.
So you aren’t going to give up, you will keep building this connection until you and the little creature connect – you can help it and it can help you when you come together.
Finally, you’ve done it – not by the original societal utterances and gestures of whistling and saying standard calls or snapping your fingers and so on. Instead, you’ve tuned in and kept at it until you connected, until you have the key and you can help the creature.
So how is this like the idea that you are free to write the worst junk?
Well, if you look at your first strategies of how you were going to get a hold of that collar with the key on it and then look at the end strategies of what it really took, you would probably say that one is not really related to the other.
You’d think they are extremely far apart, and especially would look so if you wrote down your beginning strategies and your end strategies.
This is writing your “junk” freely. You keep at it with some kind of motivation in mind, whether it is emotional or whether it is even writing with a paycheck in mind, gives you a fresh mind. What is this in zen words is known as “beginners mind.”
Things come out much faster and better with a Zen mind than if things are approached from an editor’s mind.
The best selling author Robert Ringer says he does a variation of this. He just starts writing. He knows for a fact that the first minutes of his writing, and it could be x number of minutes, 5 minutes 10 minutes, who knows, is going to be just junk.
But he knows that he has to go through it to get to the good stuff.
If he starts with a mindset along the lines of “I am going to be serious and write serious stuff right now and it’s going to be really great and it’s going to be all orderly right from the start and it will make sense and be logical and will blow everybody’s minds with my brilliance”, then this puts a grip on the mind. This approach squeezes your writing mind down and that’s not where the good stuff comes from.
So Robert Ringer would write the junk on out, knowing it would be discarded, and keep going and then through the writing flowing on this great stuff would come out after it.
But the great stuff wouldn’t have been there without writing the junk first, the crummy stuff. It’s a writer’s warm-up.
So give yourself the freedom and give yourself a true writer’s motivation to write the worst junk in the world and with this free mind I think you will be really surprised with what you’ve come up with when you go back and read it later.
I’m excited to hear about what happens when you give it a try.