Monday, October 29, 2007

How to Silence Your Inner Critic

If you've ever put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard to create something new from your own imagination, you'll know who I mean by the 'Inner Critic'.

It's the one who sits on your shoulder and whispers insidiously in your ear, sapping your energy and draining your confidence.

'You can't do this,' it says.
'Why are you bothering?
You'll never get anywhere.
You're doomed to failure.
And quite rightly so - you're crap.'

Sometimes you get on a roll and can manage to push it into the background -
- but inevitably the time comes when it's back, dripping with malice.

It may surprise you to know that just about every writer - published or unpublished, bestseller or midlister - has one of these spiteful demons challenging their urge to create.

In the BloggersWithBookDeals Forum there was a discussion recently about this phenomenon.
Realising the problem to be universal, but our responses to it to be personal, we thought we'd share the conversation by posting it on Bookarazzi.

You can follow the thread here.

While you're there, you might want to check out the other fab new material on the site, including a new Tips for Writers section.
Oh and there's another post about procrastination (the thief of time) just gone up.

2 comments:

S. Kearney said...

Great tips. Thanks for these! :-)

Saaleha said...

The Shut Up Flanders line from The Simpsons could work. but then again, maybe not...