Why It's Easier to Write Rubbish Than Your Best Ideas

What happens when you stop forcing inspiration and start understanding resistance.

I’ve got a list of things to write about, no shortage of topics, and I really feel like writing, maybe even something good for a change, but topical writing comes with an extra layer of burden. You can’t just write, you have to jump on a train of thought and ride it out of town. But there’s a lot of mental resistance to such an act, so I write trash like this, straight off the top of the old noodle. Maybe I need to just knuckle down, but brute force doesn’t work with a lazy cod like myself, sitting on the bottom of the river waiting for a yabby to crawl into my mouth. Get in my mouth, yabby.

What are the things I could tell myself to encourage me to write the hard stuff?

• Just do five minutes on it, just five.

• Pick one of your topics and just start writing. Forget about perfection, or doing it right. Do it bad, do it dirty, make a mess.

That’s probably all I’d need to get the ball rolling. Discipline is not my strong suit, I’ve always created through pull mechanisms, following my joy, doing the thing I’m drawn to.

But Ricky, you’ve got all these great topics and you’re choosing to write this nonsense. As my wife would say, “Man alive!” Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

When the topics came to me, I was on that thought, so I was excited about it. It lit up that part of my brain that says, yeah, I understand this. But then you sit down at the keyboard and look at the topics, and you’re going in cold. No lighting up of the brain. So you have no idea where to start.

But it’s a trick that I forget. You just start anywhere with that thought in mind and your brain will start to light up as it grabs a train of thought on the topic you can run with.

But at the time it all seems too hard, too complex. I want something easy that will slide down my throat. I don’t want to chew.

So I suppose the topic of this piece is, things that slide down your throat. No... Doing hard things you don’t like to do at the moment when it’s time to do them but the mood it was conceived in has left you. Probs a bit long.

Then there is another issue to stack onto the issue of not wanting to do something topical because it’s a bit harder, and it’s that list of topics. You’ve taken the time to come up with them, you’ve put them down on paper or computer, but when you go to write you have to select one of them, so you have.

The cost of choosing drains your motivation and energy. You have to decide which is most important or most motivating at the time, but what you’re really doing is looking at which topic will be easiest, the one you don’t have to think too hard about.

It’s a big trick because they’re all hard, because you’re not in the flow of the idea, the topic. So you have the first barrier I talked about before this one, just a minute ago, about that other thing that makes you just want to write off the top of your head rather than sit down and write a proper piece that would have a title that matches the article, rather than four different articles in one where you lightly touch on four different topics about your latest bowel movements, and how your neighbour is a bad human being because he asked you if he could put stuff in your bin. It’s my bin.

So how do we overcome this second and just as prescient issue? I’m not 100% sure what prescient means, or even if it’s a real word.

Choosing is difficult. Which colour candy to eat next? That’s actually easier because you plan on eating all the candy in one sitting, so if you pick the wrong candy, you don’t have to wait a day to pick your next candy, and if the candy is yukky you don’t have to chew on it for the next half hour.

We want the right candy, because the candy has value to you, and choosing the wrong candy is a problem if, when you say candy, you mean a piece of writing.

So what do you do?

You take the time to order your list of candy, at least the top three candies, so you know what you’re doing today and also the next time you write, and you don’t have to worry about choosing the right candy because you’ve already chosen what candy you’ll eat first.

Choice no longer comes into it. All you have now is problem one: overcoming the resistance to eating the pre-chosen candy on offer.

Just chew, you fat fuck.

That’s how you eat the candy, and by that I mean, that’s how you write intentionally on a topic that you’ve already chosen and deemed worthy.

And if you choose the order of candies, you’re not just choosing one candy, you’re choosing all the candies, but you’re also choosing which candy to eat first.

And what I mean by candy is piece of writing.

But you already knew that, because you’re a smart cookie.

Mmmm... cookies.