by James Dowd
So, your challenge is not merely to write, but to lose the basic realization that the world is full of Writers, that this world we live in is that very room. Yes, you are one in a great sea of minds, but to succeed, you will have to forget about it. You will have to put your head down and work. You will have to shut out the world, and you will have to shut off your anxious mind. You will have to stop thinking so damn much. And, you will have to do it without the everyday aid of reality TV, social media, and whatever else gives your brain a rest. You will have to embrace a mindful mindlessness that maintains your focus on the words and the words alone. You will have to pretend that you are the only Writer in this world, even for just a moment. You have to embrace opportunities to become a bit dumber to reality. It’s the only way to write.
Dumb Writing Tip #2: Embrace your dumb.
Don’t ever be afraid to be dumb, or to make mistakes, or to be the fool, or the outcast, or the one who stole from a university department head and were probably on camera during the whole stupid, worthless crime, even if that stolen book has served as a relic and trophy of personal success for almost twenty years. But, most especially, don’t be afraid to be dumb in the things you do for yourself, as yourself, inside your own brain, where you’re free from judgement, critique, attack, and all that negative stuff.
Admit you don’t know things and chase after knowledge and ability at every opportunity. Grow in all the good ways. Have the audacity to go after your goals with everything you’ve got; chase after them with a stick! You’ll be much happier when you do. And, you must never get to the point where your confidence prevents you from doing the simple things in life and in work. As soon as you get to the point where you think, “I’ve got this. I’ve mastered this,” that’s when you start cutting corners. That’s when you actually make dumb mistakes that ruin your writing. That’s when you stop exploring new ways of working. Even when writing a simple thank you letter to your department head for their advice, where you mention borrowing a book, but only because you thought you might have maybe remembered noticing a camera after you already stole it, you must consider that smart writing requires you to be dumb first. You must stay true to a process. You must be open to making mistakes in your head and on the page. You must be comfortable taking steps, not leaps, and doing so every single time. The moment you think you can no longer fail is when you fail most miserably. But, when you know you can fail, and you also know it’s worth it to try, that’s when you’re sure to succeed.
The Heart & The Head
"Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns
in order to look at things in a different way."
- Edward de Bono
Alright, let’s get into some real dumb advice by simplifying all writing, no matter the medium, into just two basic parts.
All writing is crafted into existence based on two things, and two things only. If you can understand these two things, and utilize them correctly, you can write anything — faster and further. I’ve used these two things as a way to express specific “mindsets” in order to focus my Writer’s brain and emotions toward the right target in the right way, at the right time. It’s a process designed to help the Writer exist as individual personas, or different parts of one’s self, with the personas reflecting the different mindsets needed to not only write effectively across mediums but to add depth to any writing project. Simply, it’s to become two completely different Writers. Now, don’t over-complicate it in your mind — don’t overthink it. It’s much simpler than it seems. You, as a Writer, are already made up of two halves. One is the Heart, and the other is the Head. One side is filled with emotion and energy. The other is based on, and delivers, sheer logic. One feels, the other thinks. Each excels at specific writing tasks, so they’re yours to call upon when needed.
Heart writing is the writing that you can’t plan or schedule. It’s the emotional stuff that sneaks up on you like song lyrics while you’re driving, or a brilliant movie concept while drinking with friends, or like a poem in the middle of the night. It’s the writing that happens entirely by accident when you weren’t thinking all that much. It’s chaotic and magical. Meanwhile, Writing with Head is something planned. It’s the exact number of pages you say you’ll do tomorrow at 6 AM, at your desk, with a hot coffee, and a shawl sweater, but not if one of those things is altered in any way. It’s about control and structure.
The great secret to writing is to not accept that structure, and form, and writing styles are concrete and unbreakable — that you can only write certain things at certain times in certain ways, or through outline. Nor is it to accept that words are something you wait for — magic floating in the air, gifted to you from the gods. The trick is not to be or harness one or the other — it’s to be and harness both. To conquer all types of writing at any time, day or night, at home or at work, is to simply use some really dumb techniques that teach you how to turn on the two sides of your writing brain so you can write what you want, what you need, whenever without feeling like you’re making an overt, complicated effort.
Without overthinking it, the Heart and the Head can be envisioned as two parts of one whole, like the Chinese principal of yin and yang. They’re seemingly opposite forces, each representing something individual and specific, yet they work together to create something greater — something powerful and Earth-moving — while also showing glimpses of one another in themselves. Believe it or not, in every great rom-com Writer, there’s a careful, logical strategist who adores the structure of their screenplays. In every great Writer of high school textbooks, there’s a poet who writes only in unrelenting passion and emotion. Your Heart and Head are a symbiotic flow of thought, feeling, and all-around energy that you can harness to write. Together, it’s a great, natural, unstoppable power, and it’s already inside you, just waiting to be recognized and let loose.
These two sides of your Writer’s self are order and chaos, with Head being order and Heart being chaos. It’s a symbiotic, cyclical relationship, with one always leading to the other. Because, as a creative, when you have order, you want to create chaos, and when you have chaos, you want to create order. However, there is a time and place for each to exist and operate, and so when you must write there, you must stay there, avoiding temptation from the other. When you have one, the other seems appealing, comfortable, intriguing, and sexy. The question becomes, when to use which side of your Writer’s mind?
Consider your Heart and Head a rotating effort of chaos and control. One feeds the other and they continuously flow onward, coiling round and round. When chaos and imagination aren’t working for you, add control, and structure, and routine. When control leaves you stuck, incorporate chaos into it to spark new ideas, breaking you lose so you’re free to explore what’s possible.
Oftentimes, when too much time is spent with order, you need chaos to spark further creativity. With too much chaos, you need order to actually create something digestible and understandable. When you begin with chaos, you create wildly, crafting more and more thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. When you follow that with order, you can structure it, cutting it down and forming it into something valuable. But, if you lead with order, you have nothing to build with. And, if you end with chaos, you end up never finishing, because there’s always more more more ideas to pack in and you can’t stop long enough to figure out where it goes and how.
As every one of us humans naturally possess these two parts within ourselves, each of us also has a dominant side, reflected in our different writing styles, preferred mediums, and processes. You’re either predominantly Heart or predominantly Head. This is why writing poetry appeals more to some (The Hearts) and writing historical novels based on heavy research appeals more to others (The Heads). Various inputs and influences can determine a shift from one to the other, but commonly, we lean toward one specifically.
When writing, there’s always a time for the logic of the Head and approaching your work carefully. Then there’s a time fo
r you to unleash raw emotion with absolute Heart. In anything you write, you must apply both but at different stages of your writing process. While particular writing projects — from a simple company email to a blockbuster movie — require either the Heart or the Head to be more dominant in the work, anything good utilizes both by moving back and forth between the two halves as needed. By recognizing these two parts of yourself — the Heart and the Head — you can call upon one and then the other to write more simply, not overthinking or over-feeling. For example, too often, when trying to write something emotional — something that a reader can connect with — we’re thinking strategically and logically, as in, “What will compel this reader to want to read this?” Or, “What will convert this audience to buy, or act?” In these moments, what we need to do is think less and feel more — utilizing the Heart, not the Head. We need to let the words and feelings flow naturally. We need to connect to the emotions of the reader through actual feeling, not through analysis. We cannot think our way to emotional connections, just as we cannot feel our way to logic and rationale. So, to get to our goals, we need to utilize the correct part of our Writer’s self at the correct time, utilizing both through our journey. We need to not just write a song but write one that’s both emotionally powerful and structurally sound. That’s something that’s truly worth singing about.
Utilizing both aspects of your mind and soul simply requires you to recognize that they exist. You’re neither a robot that is entirely logic and process, nor are you entirely Heart; a Disney princess, made only of curiosity, emotion, and imagination. You’re both of these and all of it, all jammed up into one. Your recognition of them, and your ability to already access them whether you realize it or not, is what makes you more adept at being a Writer than others. Your knowledge and feeling that they’re inside of you is what brought you here to learn more about letting them out onto the page when you need them most.
Unless you’re writing something that needs it, like a poem filled with raw emotion or a technical document with raw fact and nothing else, you’ll want to merge the two parts of your writing and thinking into one complete whole. After-all, as you carry your reader through your words, like a story, you’ll need rising and falling emotions and thoughts over a period of time. You’ll need to use the two parts to push and pull them where you want them to go, pulling the right lever at the right time to hold and guide their interest. Too flowery and emotional and they may become repulsed. Too cold, corporate, and robotic, and they will become bored.
However, finding those precise moments when to use Heart of Head takes time, practice, luck, and confidence. There is no right answer or formula, or someone would have made a lot of money off of it consistently. Every great writer wrote garbage, so even the greats clearly don’t know the precise notes of emotion and logic, and when to play them exactly. Instead, I recommend thinking higher level with these two parts of your writer’s brain. Don’t think of the small moments, but the entire writing process by employing one and then the other in your journey. One, and then the other, that’s it. First find inspiration and possibility with Heart, and then structure it with Head. Consider every idea and feeling you can muster, and then consider them all, forming and reforming through thought and logic. Heart, then Head. Give yourself time to play with words without limitations, and then follow that up with time of absolute limitations — time, structure, and focus.
Business leader, UX designer, and writer Mona Patel wrote a children’s book called The Thing About Swings, which is actually quite relevant for Writers of any age. This is a book that’s disguised as a children’s book but is really about decision making and innovation for adults, “inspiring children of all ages to question, dream, and design a better world.” In it, the elephant thinks up a million ideas, always asking “What if?” but never doing anything about it. That elephant is all Heart — full of wonder, passion, and possibility. Contrary to that elephant is the skunk, who challenges every idea. “We don’t have the budget. We don’t have the time,” the skunk always responds. The skunk is the Head of the group. It cares only about how things will be done, and wants a plan that controls and binds the idea. If the skunk doesn’t have it, then it’s not a good idea, because it’s not clear and logical. It can’t imagine a way forward for the idea, while the elephant doesn’t care to think about such menial things like plans, process, or limitations of space and time. Meanwhile, the orangutan stops dreaming and challenging and simply gets to work. There’s a time to be the elephant and lead with curiosity, wonder, and Heart. There’s a time to be the skunk, to slow things down, to use logic, to use your Head. And, there’s a time to be the orangutan, to be practical and imaginative, to apply both curiosity and logic, Heart & Head, but more important, to stop talking and just get things done — to just shut up and work. This is your effort — to not merely be a Heart or a Head, but to be both, and to stop thinking and ideating so much and just get to work.
Understanding the Heart
Diving deeper into these two parts of your Writer’s self, the Heart, the Feeler, likes to experience the emotion of the project more. It tends to be more frantic and “all over the place,” and is less strategic, capable, or interested in developing a plan prior to “creating.”
Your Heart is also more romantic and driven by the ability to use their imagination and bring new, never-before-seen things to life. It thrives on diving in head first for some play time, and it’s far more comfortable with trial and error than the Head. When faced with a challenge, it drives the Writer to be more open to seeking out information themselves. It sees that not having new ideas quickly, a lack of focus, and a feeling of being redundant as challenges, and portraying a lack of humanity as its greatest fear.
The Heart is easily distracted, which it only uses as an excuse to not write, especially when there are so many more possibilities to consider. In this endless brainstorm, everything is further research and useful, and therefore nothing ever gets done. The Heart is like a small child that’s distracted and mesmerized by the world around it, observing everything with wonder and curiosity. With this mindset, waiting for inspiration is an excuse not to write, and searching for inspiration is also an excuse not to write. That’s why focus and controlled output from the little bit of Head in this yin yang relationship within you are required to get the Heart to do any work.
The Hearts of the writing world are freewheeling and erratic, better being able to ideate and expand on thinking quickly. They’re known for creating new worlds, wonder, exploration, and possibility, not for formulas or reboots. To see someone writing with Heart is to see someone in love with words and ideas. It’s like a singer closing their eyes as they sing. Sometimes it can be annoying, but when it’s good, it’s damn good.
Freewriting, brainwriting, or flow of consciousness writing is a useful tool for letting your Heart speak without thought or inhibitions clouding it, because being “all over the place” is the very nature of that style of writing. There is no form, no structure, no purpose, no deadline — just a natural flow that’s connected to some part of you usually hidden and restricted by self-conscious. The trick is to shut the world off, to not think, even for a few moments, in order to let yourself slip into a flow state where ideas flow naturally. And, most importantly, you must never, ever try to be perfect. Give yourself time to create, and know that it will likely be useless, because it very likely will be, and that is okay — this is all part of the process. Hold yourself to no standards, because if you do, you will never meet them.
Shutting off your inner critic and your need for a structured deliverable, on a structured timeline, is quite difficult for Heady writers. It will never be easy on your first, second, or possibly even the twentieth time, but simply put your pen to the paper, or whatever medium serves you best, and write without thinking. Just know your Heart is there, let your feelings flow, and see where they take you.
Understanding the Head
The Head, or the Thinker, likes to be
more structured in the writing approach. It likes a process that defines how and when the work will be done, as well as a clear objective for how the work will be created, and then how it will exist throughout and following the journey. It likes a certain, trusted path to walk down based on experience. Trial and error is only achievable once this path has been thoroughly followed. This includes following writing schedules, a specific structure based on the project, a clear outline, and a firm, unbreakable deadline. It likes you to sit in the same chair to write, at the same time of day, with the same coffee. It sees maintaining self-confidence, as well as understanding itself and the reader, as challenges, and sounding too “ooey-gooey emotional” as its greatest fear, because it worries about coming across as vulnerable.
Despite its flaws, the Thinkers are purposeful and precise, better being able to hit a target from afar. As a Thinker, you know, can predict, and can explain things clearly and purposefully with great detail. When activated, the Thinker likes to be in charge and to be present, aware of everything. It’s like an old man giving you perfect directions, because he remembers the good old days before GPS, and he therefore knows every landmark and turn along the way.
To elevate or call upon the Head, whether because you prefer it or find it most difficult to utilize, give yourself structure and never break it, ever. Choose a small writing project and give yourself guidelines, a timeline, rules, and order, and then follow that path. Create a writing space and tell yourself exactly what you will write there and by when, and say it out loud to confirm it. Sit down and follow your plan perfectly, step by step, literally focusing on only one thing at a time.