When you first began writing, you probably found great joy in the act.
You loved rushing home from school or work to spend a few glorious moments lost in the magic of writing. Or maybe you happily woke up early to fit in time to write each day. In any case, you didn’t begrudgingly drag yourself to the blank page or struggle to get words down on paper. You wrote for the pure pleasure of writing.
Until, one day, something went wrong.
One day, you woke up and realized that you didn’t want to write. You felt strangely resistant. Your words stopped flowing the way they used to, and you began to doubt both your skills and your stories. Slowly, any joy you found in the act of writing drained away. What in the world went wrong?
Put simply, your inner critic awoke.
In one way or another, you began comparing your work to external standards. Maybe you read a great novel and realized that the author’s skills were way beyond your current capability, or maybe you read an article on story structure th…
