The mind is the most powerful thing that any human will ever have. The reality you experience isn’t the world you live in, but the reality that is created by the mind in combination with the world around you. Surely, a lack of instructions that came with our own birth may lead to catastrophe, without proper navigation of equally intelligent people, and various stimuli that shape who we are.
Sitting down to just work sounds too laughably simple to struggle, but don’t be ashamed of yourself! A creation this powerful can easily kick and scream into taking away the control from us, denying what we truly want to do; especially with a task that is not only mentally demanding but exposes who we truly are on a paper for the world to see. It can absolutely be simple and easy to focus, but how is it possible? That is to say our wonderful and flawed minds need to be understood and guided better.
To get the farthest distance in the long term, we need to first look at our subconscious beliefs and the feelings they stir up. Yes, there are advanced technical concepts I use for focus, which could be more beneficial to you the reader. But chances are, your emotions are the main thing that prevent you from writing. Most notably, it’s fear that you feel when you shut down. Even if you aren’t shutting down, if you were to observe your own thoughts, you’d find that most of the brain power is not filled with content ideas for your story.
Of course you might already know this in the form of your internal critic being something you need to shut up. However, it goes deeper than that. What is work to you? Is it draining, is it a horrible thing that you aren’t capable of handling? Have you never had consistent problems when studying, and it’s the “putting a piece of your soul into the real world” part that bothers you? Let’s go over not only the possibilities, but the process you can use to get your feet on the ground, where hopefully you’ll like it a little better.
Where do ideas come from? Surely I don’t need to answer this question, when I always have the bright idea of adjusting a cooking recipe with exact instructions because I think I know better than the chef. And yet, despite how willing I am with this idea that I simply can’t help but be unfaithful to the text, I faced more difficulty with starting this sentence when there is as much freedom on a blank paper as anyone could hope for.
Ideas do not spawn from nothingness. Even with the people who can seemingly conjure fantastic ideas at will, beyond the face that you see, their mind slaves away at some very real processes. For others however, their lack of creativity can be manifested with approachable methods. However this isn’t the only thing that can hold people back.
The greatest thing that holds people back in their creativity on a blank canvas is fear. The one emotion that is guaranteed to show up in every part in your life, our first emotion, the one that has the most immediate and overwhelming power over us. I am certain you’ve heard many preachings on how to face your fears, and do this and do that. They’re not wrong, but they don’t know who you are or what you’re doing. Despite many advice to “just write, no one will care”, many have their works torn into for being bad. Maybe you know an online personality or celebrity who is a terrible human being, who releases an okay song, and the song is endlessly mocked. Sure it’s because of the person, but the people who either watch or participate in the mocking still intake conflicting messages to express themselves freely while tearing into someone and leaving a passable creative work out of it. Social exile is still a very real thing.
So, instead of telling you to stop fearing, here are the things that help me express myself more comfortably. These will also include ways to build your own creative process.
- Learn from creative works that you didn’t like, and describe why and what you don’t like. It doesn’t need to be from the worst works of fiction ever created, like your notebook from grade school, although it can. Just anything that you find discomfort with. Is it wrong? Is it too emotional too quickly? Is it disingenuous? Personally, I do not like works that start by trying to seem important by relating to everyone in the world, though it can be hard to avoid. Something such as “we all do…”.
- Learn how other works avoid the problems you’ve listed, or simply what they do right. There are books I’ve read which are emotional and dramatic and romantic, and you have a medium sized suspicion that this writer used to write some embarrassingly bad stuff. And yet, the books are written by my absolute favorite author (Laini Taylor). Go out there and learn, there is someone out there who has encountered the same roadblock that you have and solved it, in which you can figure out how by reading their fiction. For the problem I listed above with the populace adherence, I found that the best solution is to start with describing someone with a purpose or a concept that needs developing. And instead of telling the reader that you’re supposed to think they’re important, describe them for who they are and let the reader decide if they are important or not.
- Let go of your identity that tells you what you can or cannot do. Seriously! Stop! Whether you think you’re stupid, ugly, boring, fat, broke, unlovable, immature, inexperienced, whatever. You start with the same human mind as everyone else’s, barring some horrible disability or brain injury, and even then people have produced fantastic creative works. I cannot magically detect these things through text that you write, only the quality of your character, which also means that you should not be judging others who also have things you don’t like. Writing is about words, and everyone gets an equal start.
Establish your own philosophy and purpose of life. What do I want to communicate? What emotions do I want to explore? Then, your fiction should be an exploration of what you want to feel and expand on in your own philosophy. If you know the purpose of why you face a blank page in the first place, then that will guide you to come up with something new.
Sensitive topics don’t need to be addressed just because they might cause shock value, and it’s reasonable to simply not include them in your work. However, if every writer did this, surely the reading population would go crazy by the seeming erasure of all things taboo. Writing is an expression and experiences and ideas are to be expressed, and it is the attitude of the people and our primal instinct that determines a topic’s sensitivity.
If you intend to write about a sensitive topic, you should think about what makes it sensitive in the first place.
The topic needs to be approached in a 3rd person view. It’s extremely easy to mess up, so you don’t want your audience to assume that you associate with something morally wrong. Not only do you want, as the author, to be a 3rd party of this topic, but you need to be precise with your communication of this topic.
If the content has caused harm to people, show respect to its victims. Do research if needed. Don’t fall into ignorant traps of “oh, it’s not that bad” or “you’re a victim because you are ____”. Even if you don’t think this way, it can be misunderstood. Let’s say a morally bad character is a victim, make sure that their personality and the sensitive topic are two different things, even if the personality is affected. Many people today are willing to throw blame and hate, even if readers are more immune to this.