If You Stay in Your Head Your Writing is Dead
When overanalysing kills your flow and your words.
One of my biggest challenges when writing is the over analyzing and over thinking the words that come out and appear on screen in front of me.
How many times should you edit and read over your own work? Well, that probably depends on what that work is for. If blogging or writing is not your day job, but rather a small portion of what you do, a hobby or a piece of your business puzzle, then perfectionism can be a killer.
When you stay in your head, thinking about each word and sentence you lose your flow. You lose the emotion. Worst of all you can lose the rawness which is what makes the words real to the reader. I know I skip those contrived posts and sales pitches, and let’s face it we need too because we are bombarded with them every day!
My over thinking and over analysing comes from a place of self-consciousness and in that place I want everything to be right. I don’t want to be seen making a mistake or posting something that someone else thinks is stupid. Could you even imagine what it would feel like to get absolutely pummeled with negative comments? LOL. I haven’t been there yet but I know there’s many who face this daily. I feel like I’d probably analyse those comments, reanalyse my post and then over think a response and the whole time I’d be beading with sweat. When really it doesn’t matter at all!
Staying too long in thought and being trapped in your head is a barrier to the real you flowing through your words. There’s no need to put up a front in your writing and pretend to be someone else. On paper (or even in life) you don’t need to be the person that everyone else expects that you will be. The people who love you should love you regardless. Those who respect you will still respect you if you write something they don't agree with even if it is littered with typos. (Well maybe not littered with typos cause they might think your careless, but a few will be ok I’m sure).
Like me, you might come to a realisation that the reason you have a lot of drafts and relatively few published posts is because you’re thinking about it too much.
Which is why I’m going to keep the following in mind and you should too:
If I stay in me head my writing is dead.
