Sometimes in our writing journey, we need to take a step back and reflect on what we’ve learned. A lot of our lessons are valuable and well worth remembering, but we also can be led astray by bad advice, bad thinking, and bad experiences. In a post on the BookBaby blog, Janna Lopez says the New Year is a good time to unlearn a few things about writing.
- Unlearn what you think “writing” means. “Many of us were taught that writing is a ‘discipline’,” Lopez says. “As a discipline, it only happens one way: sitting down every day, at the same time, for a forced amount of time, staring at an empty screen.” But there’s more to the writing process: reading, observing, taking notes, listening to music, and meditating also contribute to your creative process. Unlearn forced discipline and replace it with creative showing up.
- Unlearn writing for others. “Yes, you need to understand who you’re addressing to best serve them, but falsely bending words, ideas, or proclamations to cater to pre-conceived audiences may inhibit the richness of what you really have to say, who you really are, or the magic of what you offer,” Lopez writes. “Watering down words to appeal to a generic, more widely attainable audience is like removing signature spices from a bold recipe.”
- Unlearn the rules. “There’s little to no expressive freedom if you’re sentenced (pun intended) to conformity,” Lopez says. “Break formal writing rules just to see how it feels or what you can come up with. You’ll be amazed with the qualitative difference in your writing by unlearning structural confines.”
