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Terror Week Day Four: Locking Up Your Inner Karen
🕑 Added 2024-09-06 07:06:36 +0000 UTCEarlier in the week I asked you what you feared as writers. You told me you were scared of judgement, of not succeeding, and of taking “too long” to pick up the tools. These are the terrors that cause writer’s block. We’re so frightened about what might happen after we’ve written something that we can’t manage to actually write. Our inner Karens are shouting so loudly we can barely manage to put down a word.
The first commandment of writing is “Thou shalt not write a first draft with Karen in the room.”
Karen needs to go. She might be useful when you edit your work later, but if you’re facing a blank page, that bitch needs to be kept away.
But how do you get Karen to leave? By building a special compartment for her.
I have two writing rooms: The one where I write and the one where I edit. I’ll give you one guess which room Karen lives in. She’s my inner editor, so she must live in the editing room. The writer’s room is full of Minions, glitter, bean bags, and giraffes. Yes, giraffes. My editor’s room is as sterile as a hospital. The floors are bleached. There is no décor to speak of, just an infinite shelf of dictionaries and a Karen.
You’ve heard the cliché, “dance like no one’s watching”? Well, you need to write like no one’s watching, too. You’ve got to promise yourself that nobody ever needs to see the screed you’re putting down on paper right now. Your first draft is your playroom, so it’s not the place to decide whether to make that draft public. You must give yourself permission to go crazy. You must ignore Karen’s knocking and dedicate yourself to making glitter bombs and tying giraffe necks in bows.
Only once you’ve set the work down can you take it into The Karen Room. Karen is rather good at fixing things, so she has her place. You just can’t let her go anywhere she pleases because she’s sort of a bitch. She wants you to stop breaking things, and great writers cannot produce masterpieces without breaking things.
Exercise
Write the craziest thing you can manage. The next day, see whether you can edit it into a readable and disciplined piece.
