Gabriele Lusser Rico says, “Writing is inherently a much more natural process if we learn to flow with, rather than fight, the natural cooperative rhythms of the hemispheres of our brain.” For children, this is easy, but years of education and social pressures have made “flow” difficult for adults.
As toddlers, it was okay to pick up any crayon and color outside the lines. Then we learned how very wrong that was. Trees weren’t red. Cows could no longer be purple. We learned how to color correctly, careful to stay inside the lines, striving to meet social standards for great artistry.
By guarding our words, making sure we were politically correct, we sought love and appreciation. We had to please our parents, our teachers, and our bosses. After working for decades to please everyone else, we have forgotten how to be ourselves and speak our minds.
We have “writer’s block” when we look for that ideal concept or perfect phrase while, at the same time, we reject whatever is on our minds. Can we write something that isn’t on our minds? No, that’s impossible. The only solution to hesitant writing is to flow with whatever comes to mind, no matter how irrelevant or silly the words might seem to be.
Practice thirty minutes of free writing each day. The only rule is, “there are no rules”—except that you must write whatever comes to mind. If you’re thinking, I don’t know what to write, then those are the words that should appear on the page. That practice—over time—will free you to be yourself, creating a unique writing voice that your audience will want to hear.
