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But the writer doesn’t really need psychotherapy
for this. All he or she needs is an understanding of how
the human mind is working at the moment of the
“block.”
The cure for writer’s block—and also the road to
self-motivation—is simple. The cure is to go ahead and
write badly.
Novelist Anne Lamott has a chapter in her marvel-
ous book Bird by Bird called “Shitty First Drafts.” The
key to writing, she says, is to just start typing anything—
it can be the worst thing you’ve ever written, it doesn’t
matter.
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first
efforts,” says Lamott. “You need to start somewhere.
Start by getting something—anything—down on paper.”
By the mere act of typing you have disempowered
the pessimistic “voice” that tried to convince you not to
write. Now you are writing. And once you’re in action,
it’s easy to pick up the energy and pick up the quality.
Singer-songwriter John Stewart says, “When
you’re in the first stages of creating, never, ever cen-
sor yourself.”
We’re often afraid to do things until we’re sure we’ll
do them well. Therefore we don’t do anything. This ten-
dency led G.K. Chesterton to say, “If a thing is worth
doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
Going out for a run gives me an example of the same
phenomenon. Because I don’t feel that I have a good,
strong run in me, the voice says “not today.” But the
cure for that is to decide to do it anyway—even if it
will be a bad run. “I don’t feel like running now, so I’m
going to go out and run slowly, in such lazy, bad form
that it does me no good, but at least I will have run.”