When you show up to write, who's setting the course for the journey—your inner storyteller, or your inner critic?
We all have an inner critic, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a manifestation of the same cautionary voice that tells us some basic truths like “Hey, you do know that if you go around doing a bunch of stupid shit, you might literally die, right??”
The inner critic has its place. But it’s a uniquely terrible storyteller. You can't play and explore with somebody who thinks you're going to literally die if your first draft has too many adverbs in it.
Here's the good news: To write transformational work, you don't have to kill off your inner critic. You just need to stop writing in partnership with them.
This month, we're exploring how to write in partnership with our curiosity—with a version of ourselves who’s always willing and eager to see what comes next. (Even when the inner critic thinks there's danger out in the forest.)
Tune in to discover two key shifts to create deep, lasting change in your relationship to your inner critic:
And don't forget to check out the writing praxis tips for some concrete ways to apply these shifts in your creative practice!
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When it comes to ending your creative partnership with the inner critic, there's one sticky element that can easily trip you up: Simply deciding you don't want to listen to the critic doesn't make them go away.
It's the classic "don't think of a pink elephant" problem. The harder you try not to heed the inner critic, the louder that voice is likely to become.
To stop capitulating to the critic and start building more compassion into your writing practice, you need an approach that's about allowing new possibilities, not just giving yourself one more thing to fail at.
Read on for some actionable tips to set yourself up for creative compassion both before you show up to write, and during your writing session.
Your first bit of homework is to identify your personal brand of writerly self-soothing. When the inner critic gets too loud, what do you tend to do to avoid the stress of creating vulnerable work?
I mention some common self-soothing behaviors in the episode: endless copyediting, aimless brain dumping, or simply not writing at all. Maybe you fall into one of those camps, or maybe your go-to avoidance tactic is different.
Look for whatever your instinct is when you begin a writing session and immediately start to struggle. What task do you usually want to pivot to instead of actually engaging with your story? (It may or may not be a writing task. That sudden urge to do laundry definitely counts.)
Once you've identified your self-soothing fallbacks, come up with something specific and concrete you can do before each writing session to help you resist them.
For example, I'm a major faux-productive copyeditor. Left to my own devices, I start each session by re-reading what I wrote last time—and when I'm in the grips of the inner critic, I'll spend my full writing time fiddling with hyphens and swapping adjectives (even though the story itself is nowhere near finished).
To nix that self-soothing habit, I'm experimenting with one simple trick (ha). I'm starting every writing session in a blank document, and then pasting the new wordcount into my draft when I'm done. I can't do any counter-productive polishing if there's nothing there to polish.
Whatever you decide on as your trick, keep it easy to implement. And if you can, make it something built in to the way you're writing. (On paper, so you'll write slower or so you can't delete things easily? Dictating a short audio memo and then typing it up, if you tend to dump words and never look at them again?)
Your next task is to brainstorm some compassionate ways to handle the inner critic when they're messing with you (or rather, hypervigilantly protecting you) during a writing session.
Focus on things you can do to acknowledge the inner critic without letting them derail your creativity. Think of this as sort of a necessary, momentary mini-soothing. Your goal is to accept the presence of the critic and their fears without actually letting those fears take over.
Going back to my example of self-flagellating revision, here's how I'm currently responding when the critic wants me to stop in the middle of a sentence and spend the next fifteen minutes finding the best, most-interesting-but-not-amateurishly-purple synonym.
Like the trick of writing in a new document, it's straightforward and tangible: I highlight the line in a different font color and then move the hell on. (I find that a very subtle highlight color works well—something I can genuinely see later to help me spot the wonky wording, but not so high contrast that the page turns into a splatter painting.)
This type of simple action can start building new habits of compassion right into your writing process.
Remember that working definition of creative compassion from the episode: the keen but accepting eye. How might the compassionate eye respond in the moment?
Taking some concrete but small action to acknowledge the critic allows you to accept and redirect, rather than getting bogged down—so you can keep doing the deeper work of discovering your story.
Looking for that tea I teased in the episode about this month's referenced books, The Flowering Wand and Anam Cara? Get the full Irish breakfast cuppa here.
Critiques/examinations of self-care: