Lowering The Stakes While Writing
Sometimes, it helps to just write something you don't care about.
On Craft…
Sometimes, the page is too daunting to face. There have been plenty of times in my writing life where I’ve wanted to pen a piece, but have struggled to bring my whole self to the Google doc. The dissonance between my desire and my ability felt damning, and as I felt I had no outlet for my creativity, I cried—shocker.
Over the past year, I’ve gone back to advice a friend gave me during high school and adapted it to help me through this particular strand of writer’s block. Back in junior year, this friend told me: “Write something bad; write something you don’t care about.” Taken another way, what he was really telling me was to lower the stakes. This is some of the best advice you can give a writer whose obsession with perfection makes them crazy.
There are plenty of ways to lower the stakes when you’re writing. For me, the best thing to do is to take my thoughts to another page entirely. On my desk, I keep a pitching notebook, a journal, and a pad of stationary gifted to me by my girlfriend’s grandmother. I let ideas percolate within the pitching notebook, and I let ideas take a clearer shape on the stationary. I put as much distance between my thoughts and my official page—the Google doc—as possible. With all these steps before I get to typing, there’s a sense of relaxation to my process.
Too, it helps to remember not everything is so fucking precious. Not every word you type will be the word of your career. Learn to let go as you move from sentence to sentence. Learn to appreciate impermanence. There’s a lot of freedom in remembering backspacing is a natural part of the process. Delete whole pieces if you must—it’s okay. Write the silliest things you can think of to get them out of your system. Write on everything and anywhere. Break your routine—I know, that’s heavy coming from me—in little ways to reset your creative bounds.
The best way to lower the stakes is to assert yourself over the page by making everything the page. Try writing on napkins. Try writing on your desk. Try writing somewhere you previously felt uncomfortable. Get a new pen with a different color; stimulate yourself in the little ways. Allow yourself to stop thinking and forget calculation. Become a vessel for your thoughts. Let them run through you and put them everywhere but the capital “P” page. They’ll get there eventually. Don’t rush. Just allow. When you finally reach the Page itself, force nothing and coalesce everything. The stakes are never as high as they seem.