Writing is like weightlifting for the brain. Just as you’ll improve your food diet if you start cooking, you’ll improve your information diet if you start writing. - David Perell
Writing more consistently is up there for me with eating healthier and exercising more because these are habits that are essential for building a quality life. It helps you to build awareness of what is going on inside your mind, preserves what's going on there, discover patterns that aren't clear, connect ideas from different things you must have read or seen, put down lingering thoughts to give space for more ideas, make sense of things that has happened and make space to plan for things that will happen.
This is an essay on how to reduce the friction between you and your writing. Reducing the friction is basically cancelling whatever might be the thing which hinders you from writing. The one which makes writing seem like a chore, difficult or what makes you have writers block.
Lower Your Standards
What this means is that you need to lower the standards you have for your writings. This is usually the internal standards we didn't know we've set for our writings. To make them as polished as possible, like we're publishing the minute we're done writing. Write for the sake of writing, not publishing. Separating the process of writing from the process of publishing helps you to write without pressure and you are able to stick to just writing, no editing, no publishing, simply writing. The beauty of writing is, you don't need to find another person that wants to hear your idea, you simply open a blank page and pour your thoughts into it.
Start With a Rough Draft
It's easier to start from a rough draft of an idea you've captured previously than to start with a blank page. And you can start these drafts in short sentences, to make points that you can continually build on into paragraphs that can then be backed with references, facts and quotes as you revisit.
Gather Enough Raw Material
As regards having writers block, it's not that you have writers block and can't write. It's that you do not have enough material to work with. You have to allow an idea to simmer with you for a bit, brainstorm the idea via different medium (writings both short and long, pictures, diagrams, music, podcasts etc). The longer an idea sits with you, and you continue to ponder on it, research about it, take notes on it, the better the material you'd gather to write about it.
Write Like You Talk
Most times when we try to write, we think too much about it because there's this pressure that comes on us that makes us want to use the most polished or ambiguous words. You should write like you talk and leave the polishing for much later.
The important thing should be putting thoughts down on paper. How it looks in the moment doesn't matter because you are not writing to publish. It's like when you want to cook a meal, looking at an empty kitchen counter and an empty pot makes it harder to cook. But when your kitchen counter is filled with small plates of ingredients, veggies, protein all prepped and ready, it makes cooking the food so much easier cause all you have to do is throw in all the ingredients in to the pot to make something tasty.
Writing like you talk helps you to write simple. You should always write simply. It reduces the friction to writing.
In essence, simply writing should be your first priority. It is important to know that 50% of the idea you started with will eventually be cut out or refined. This should allow you to write, write as much as you can and write confidently. 80% of the ideas you end up publishing only happen after you start writing, so allow yourself to be free, reduce the friction and write away.
References:
- "Building a second brain" by Tiago Forte
- Write like you talk
- Write briefly