As a writer, I try to do as many different things as possible because you never know what will contribute to your current story, or inspire your next.
Anne Weiser Cornell, a practitioners of the psychological healing technique called Focusing recently wrote:
“Eventually, everyone inside us, all the aspects and parts, will have something to contribute to us. There are no enemies inside, only partial-selves trying to find their way back to life-forward energy”.
I like that, particularly how it applies to writing.
Firstly, as writers we must get past the idea that we are only writers. We do so much more than that. We observe, we analyze, we hypothesize, we dream. Even when we are not writing, we are writing. There are no bad experiences, just new material.
Secondly, we must stop being so critical when it comes to what we’ve included in our stories. As Cornell says, “There are no enemies inside.” My motto is “Don’t Get It Right, Get It Written,” and instead of editing as you go, just get the story down and then go back and do the fine-tuning later.
