Blatant Optimism

That experience was so pwerful that it became the origin of an exercise which I called "the critic's page". As I sat down to rework the introduction I took out an extra sheet of paper and titled it "the critic's page". I started writing, and it wasn't long before I became aware of the critical voice at the back of my mind. I hadn't been conscious of it when I was writing in the middle of the night, but now my mind was extremely active, judging and evaluating what I was writing. Now I just wrote the criticisms down on the ciritics page. Whatever they were - "These pages are no good," "Boring," "I've read this before," "No one's going to read this." "Who are you kidding," "This will never sell," etc etc etc. I simply said to myself "So What?" and continued writing.

That took the energy off of writing "perfect" words. And when I read over the critic's page a few days later, I saw I had written the same negative comeents over and over again. My comments were always the same. I couldn't believe it.