I can't hear you!

What?! Huh? I'm not listening to you! Sounds like the ranting of a 2 year old but these are things we might wish we could say to that naughty, whining inner critic voice. The little voice that fills your head with dark doubts and despair while paralyzing our fingers and keeps us from typing a perfectly crafted manuscript.

So how do you tune out your inner critic?

Just start writing! Begin by typing whatever first pops into your head. Write about the weather, type gibberish, describe the cream patterns in your coffee, the dust particles floating in the air. Be serious or light hearted. Write about all your fears or the crazy things your kids do. Just keep writing and soon you won't even notice that little voice. Write nonsense for 15 minutes, then an amazing thing will happen...

You will find yourself focused and able to concentrate. Ideas, characters, scenes, and plot twists start flowing sometimes faster then you can type. You are now on fire and nothing is going to stop you!

My husband recently gave me several writing notebooks. Along with them, he included a note:

My Beloved,

These are hungry, "no perfection allowed" notebooks. They must be fed constantly with wild imperfect ideas and sentences. Bad spelling is best. If they do not get frequent entries they will whine and complain. If too much thought is put into the wording, they will whine and complain. If you worry about what you are writing, they will whine and complain. Feed them well! If you do, they will provide you seeds for stories.

-Love, Ben

The key is to write, write, write and then write some more. Write a lot! Don't worry about the imperfections... for now. Just keeping writing and write everyday. Those little voices will come back from time to time. E.L. Doctorow said it best, "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

Drown out those voices with the noise from your keyboard!