Writing Without Critics (18/30)

Thirty essays in thirty days, number eighteen

Through these first eighteen days, I’ve actually been surprised at the quality of my writing. It’s not that I planned on publishing thirty days of garbage—I wouldn’t subject you to that—but I’ve found a flow that I didn’t expect. An exercise that was primarily meant to circumvent perfectionism has actually produced some pretty solid stuff.

A big reason for this, I think, is that the constraint has kept me from writing for the critic.

Writing for the critic is what happens when fear takes over. You start thinking about how every idea you have could be refuted, how every story could fall flat, how every sentence could be an indictment of your writing. You imagine your audience as a group of angry Amazon reviewers: the snootiest, most nitpicky, most hostile readers out there. You envision everything you write being torn apart. This leads to bland, impotent work.

A benefit of publishing daily is that I haven’t had time to write for the critic. The fear circuits in my brain have been overridden by the “shit, it’s 1am and I need to publish something” circuits. It’s been liberating. Ideas that are not subject to an excruciating audit, it turns out, are much less skittish about surfacing. Words appear on the page by necessity. And, oftentimes, they’re pretty good.