Writing Practice: Not What Your English Teacher Taught You. Tip #6

      If you take as gospel the way you were taught to write in school, stop reading here!
      Now I’m not trashing your English teacher. I’m simply encouraging you to use the method I used successfully as a writing/English teacher with my own students in grades 2, 6, 8, and 9 through 12.
      One of the most difficult things for a writer to do is to write without stopping. Simply keep your hand/fingers moving, with a pencil or at the keyboard. If you keep your hand moving, your inner editor can’t keep up with it and stop you. This kind of writing frees your creativity, and your creative self gets to write what it wants to write.
       Lose control. Write what you want to write. Don’t worry if it’s polite or correct. If you do this, your writing will become significantly more authentic.
Be specific. Not car, but Cadillac. Not fruit, but strawberries. Be gentle with yourself. Don’t give your inner editor any room. Don’t think. Often we write in  
second thoughts, or even thoughts on thoughts. Stay with your initial flash of thought.
      Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Editing is for later.
You are free to write the worst stuff in the universe. Revision is for later.
You may not like everything you write, but go for the jugular. As Hemingway wrote, “Write hard and clear about what hurts,” write about what frightens you. Don’t avoid this kind of writing because it has all the energy. No writer has ever died from it.
If you do these things, you are practicing writing. and as we all know, practice makes perfect!

• Write furiously to get your first thoughts down.
• Put it away and let it rest while you work on something new.
• Get it out after two months.
• Read it. Now you are ready to do the real writing, to finish it and let it tell you what it needs to be.

             
                                          --D. C. Cassidy, BA, MA, and National Writing Project Fellow