Do you ever look at your writing and think, “Wow, this is bad.”? I do. We all do. For most people, that happens during the revising process. For a select few that happens at the end, when they think, “Well, this is it.” For me, it happens as I’m writing my first draft. Which is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I think it can only get better from here. A curse because I find it difficult to begin because I know it’s going to be bad.

But I have to start somewhere. 

Writing is Power author Peter Elbow gives a few notes of advice to avoid that sinking feeling we get when we’re faced with our own work. The first: recognize that those negative feelings you have are there when you feel them. This is a good way to understand patterns at the root of the problem, and it’s a very… therapeutic method. 

I suggest that instead of just recognizing the problem, add a bit to it by doing something about the problem at the same time. It’s really classical conditioning. Every time you feel yourself becoming nauseous at your work, write another word, another sentence, another paragraph. 

Just keep writing. 

The next step Elbow gives to helping yourself overcome nausea is to do a free write in which you let all of your feelings go. This is Elbow basically saying to go outside and scream at the sky to get all those emotions out before they make their sly way onto the page, where they’ll end up eating your writing work. Keeping your emotions separated and contained during the writing process is a great piece of advice, I’ll give him that.

I’d like to take a slightly different approach. This may be a stretch, but let’s think of the Meisner technique of acting for a moment. While it is a different hemisphere of creating art, its fundamental aspects can still be applied in a way. The Meisner technique has three essential pieces: emotional preparation, repetition, and improvisation. Most people when employing this technique learn their lines in the most robotic way possible, so that when it comes time to rehearse and perform, they have the ability to explore different ways of speaking and different emotions, because they don’t have an already set way of saying your line in your head.

In the same way, you can write without any emotion involved, robotically, so that when you get to the revising process, you have more room to explore different ways to say one sentence or paragraph. This sort of “unemotional” first draft helps me when I think to just write without stopping.

Elbow’s last tip is to be prudent. Don’t delete everything in a fit of rage. Don’t go too crazy. This, I wholeheartedly agree with. I’ve spent way too much time writing an entire draft, deleting it, and starting from scratch. That’s inefficient, and not useful to you whatsoever. 

Focus on the words on the page, not the feelings in your head.