Prewrite

No Censorship

Ponder This

"Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort."

--Clarice Lispector

"Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?"

--Kurt Vonnegut

"Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

--Franz Kafka

"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."

--Samuel Beckett

"Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down." (Tweet Quote)

~Julia Cameron

Almost everything we do and say is censored in some way. Perhaps we don’t cuss in front of our grandmas. Or we don’t tell our bosses exactly what we think of them. We say and do what we think will get us what we want, suppressing those things we realize might prevent us from reaching our goals. In addition, we are constantly in a state of self-criticism. How many times a day to you call yourself “stupid” or “fat” or “ugly”? Stop it!

The critic in you, the one who tells you it’s not good enough, or you’re not good enough, has to go. There’s no room in a successful life for that destructive creature, whose only goal is to sabotage every creative action you take. Imagine a world in which mistakes were not allowed—imagine a world in which nobody did anything they weren’t sure of. Do you suppose Thomas Edison invented the light bulb on his first try? I guarantee there were some explosions and he burned off his eyebrows once or twice. And I guarantee there were those who ridiculed him and taunted him, even, for his “stupid” experiments, perhaps calling him irresponsible for damaging property and people. Now the whole world uses light bulbs. Not to mention the plethora of electricity-reliant things we take for granted today . . . . Edison allowed himself to make mistakes, and he learned from those mistakes. I want you to do the same.

There are countless writers who were told in school they couldn’t write. And countless writers who wrote books we now revere which were censored, ridiculed, and called “trash” by many (Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and Ernest Hemingway to name a very, very few.) In addition, you don’t have to be inventing the light bulb for your ideas to be important. We are all having a human experience, and you are an expert on your experiences. If you think you’re the only person who feels the way you do, I invite you to remember there are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Do you really think your ideas aren’t shared by at least one of those 7 billion?

Your ideas can strengthen, bolster, aid and comfort others. Your ideas can change the world. We didn’t always have the Amber Alert, you know. That great idea was born out of tremendous pain. Parents and friends were brave enough to share that pain and seek to prevent others from experiencing it.

Joseph Campbell says about mythology,

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. It used to be that the university campus was a kind of hermetically sealed-off area where the news of the day did not impinge upon your attention to the inner life and to the magnificent human heritage we have in our great tradition—Plato, Confucius, the Buddha, Goethe, and others who speak of the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives. When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life—well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry (1-2).

I would add writing, especially personal experiences, falls into the “literature of the spirit.” It is in our daily struggles that profound truths emerge. Write without worrying about who is going to read your piece. Write it as if no one is going to read it. Write it because you can, because it’s yours, because it’s true for you. Worry about the rest of it later.

Don’t tell yourself you’re not a writer. You may have no desire to pursue writing as a career, but you will have to write things to get by in life. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t decide not write a piece, or (God forbid!) not to write at all because you think it’s no good. If it comes to you, write it down. In the editing process, you can make decisions about what belongs and what doesn’t, what works and what doesn’t. In the prewriting and first draft processes, just write it down.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. First Anchor Books Edition, July 1991. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.