I wrote most of my blog posts at night after finishing work for the day. It is usually the best time, but it also a much harder time of the day for me to write. Late at night, the critical voice in your head gets harder to ignore. You get started with an idea and then quickly give up because you don’t know where it is going or don’t feel like you have enough energy to see it through.
The allure of distraction also gets harder to resist. You pull your computer out to write your post and then decide that you will quickly check twitter or watch a video on YouTube–before you know it, it is one hour later and you still haven’t written anything.
The most crucial discipline when writing is to simply get out of your own way and get your thoughts down on the page.
Once you have your idea written out, then you can edit and work to improve it, but if you give in to your inner critic or to distraction, you never build enough momentum to actually get a post started.
Editing or giving into distraction while writing is like starting to run and then stopping after two strides because your second stride was off. You won’t ever get better at running and you won’t ever get where you are trying to go.
When you are in the act of writing, and especially late at night, you need to push aside distraction and the urge to critique & edit what you’ve already written. Just focus on getting to the end of the idea without stopping. Then come back and edit it after.
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