Authors, Do All The Things at Your Current Level

Prove to yourself you’re bad at marketing, sales, and outreach

Photo by Leslie Lopez Holder on Unsplash.

How to get over writer’s block? Prove to yourself that you’re bad at writing. Just write and discover how bad you actually are. We encounter this advice early and often as writers.

In Julia Cameron’s go-to, The Artist’s Way, she instructs to vomit out three pages of stream-of-consciousness, regardless of quality, in daily “morning pages.” Bypass your inner critic, spark creativity, and write, write, write.

In the beloved The War of Art, Steven Pressfield emphasizes “doing the work” despite resistance, fear, or perfectionism. He implies that pushing ahead, pushing through with writing — even bad writing — is better than doing nothing. Embrace the bad writing and do it anyway.

Ann Lamott famously advocates for “shitty first drafts.” In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, she notes: “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

Natalie Goldberg teaches in Writing Down the Bones, this writing practice: set a timer and write without stopping, editing, or worrying about quality. Bad writing is to be expected, even welcomed, because the goal is to access deeper, more authentic material.