Slaying Your Inner Critic

In This Issue:

• Main Essay: Slaying Your Inner Critic by Marcella Allison
• Resource Referral: Mentoring That Frees You
• Quick Marketing Tip: What You Can Learn From First Day Jitters

Editors Note: Paralyzed by the page? Overwhelmed by all the voices in your head telling you how terrible your writing is? You’re not alone. Today’s guest essayist, Marcella Allison has been there, done that, and lived to learn a few things about how to get over it and find your voice again. Read on…

Slaying Your Inner Critic
by Marcella Allison

This past winter, I lost my way. I stopped believing in myself…worse I stopped believing in my ability to write. It didn’t happen all at once. It sort of snuck up on me.

It started when I ended up with four different writing mentors. Now, one mentor would be enough for most writers. In fact, many new copywriters are still searching for and hoping to land a great mentor. And here I was with four of them. All of them top level, highly paid, experienced copywriters. What more could a girl ask for?

What I didn’t realize, is too much of a good thing can silence you. Somehow in the process of learning to write from four different masters of the craft – writing and rewriting, studying and critiquing page after page – I lost my own voice.

I was paralyzed. I’d write a sentence or a paragraph and then I would immediately think of 50 reasons why it was a piece of trash. Every sentence had to be perfect before I could go onto the next one. The only problem was I could never get that first sentence right. Every promotion became a trip through Dante’s Inferno… circle after circle of writing hell.

The critic was in total control. The critic was the silent cloaked figure at the end of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol pointing wordlessly to a tombstone with my name on it. Like a gawker at an accident site, I’d sit for hours staring at the blank page, watching this terrible tragedy unfold, and yet I was helpless, struck dumb, unable to move…

So what finally got me moving? One, a health crisis brought about by stress. Two, sheer terror at the possibility of failure. And three, a collection of tried and true tools for creative recovery. While I don’t recommend surgery or terror as motivation for writing, I can suggest a few creative tricks to try if you ever find yourself on the dark side of the critic:

1) Get up early. If you read Early to Rise, you’ve already heard Michael Masterson extol the virtues of starting your day an hour early. But there’s another benefit, one that I never suspected.

Here’s what I discovered. When I wake up at 5 a.m., I am gentler on myself. Turns out, my critic is not a morning person. He tends to wander downstairs about 10 a.m. in his boxer shorts. He stands there scratching himself and asking if there is any coffee while I madly type away. Yesterday he was shocked to realize I’d snuck eight pages of copy past him while he was still sleeping.

Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, put it this way, "I wake in the very early morning and like to start an hour or two before sunrise as if to catch the tailwind of my dreams. Also, pragmatically, I prefer to start when all the judges are still sleepy, including the harshest one, myself.”

2) Spew words onto the page. Every morning after you wake up, write three pages of long hand stream of consciousness ranting. Write anything that’s on your mind. This isn’t for quality or publication – it’s just to purge your mind of all the detritus that gets in the way of you actually sitting down to write.

It can be one long bitch session… three pages of fears about how you are $4.56 cents away from poverty, obsessive thoughts about your spouse, everything that’s wrong with your kids, or just a grocery list for that week. Doesn’t matter. You’re just skimming the debris off the top of your mind. Think of it like a pool skimmer catching dead leaves, bugs, green slimy things – leaving only clear blue water underneath.

It’s like the pensive in Harry Potter. You simply place the wand next to your brain and you siphon off all those distracting worries and trap them on three 8 ½ x 11 inch pieces of paper so that they can’t interfere with what you really need to say. Julia Cameron calls this daily practice “morning pages” and if you want a wonderful resource for overcoming writers block, check out her book, The Artist’s Way.

While I was wrestling with my demons, I started, each day, dutifully filling three pages with self conscious ramblings and worries. Like a teenager obsessively popping black heads in the mirror, I listed all my fears and panics… “Why can’t I write? How am I going to get all this work done? Maybe I can’t make it as a writer.” And slowly, very slowly, my creative unconscious started to peek it’s head out of hiding to see if it was safe to come out and play on the page or if it was about to be bludgeoned by the critic.

Third, never underestimate the power of a really lousy first draft. Just throw some words at the page and see what sticks. You don’t obsess about it, you just write something down. They key is to let your thoughts flow freely, writing fast enough to stay ahead of the censor. Here’s how Anne Lamott put it in Bird by Bird, “What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.” And quieting those voices is no small task, in fact, according to Lamott, “Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily…”

So now I get up at 5 a.m. while the perfectionist in my brain is still half asleep, and I write like a bat out of hell before he wakes up. Then later, I let the critic have an orgasmic feast tearing apart my rough draft. But by then, I’ve got enough words on paper, that the critic can actually help craft it. I’m past the tender “get it down” stage and onto the refining stage.

Which brings me to the final step in creative recovery…

3) Write what you love. You have to write more than promotions, otherwise, you’ll start to hate what you love… writing. I’ve recently rejoined my community of writers, Women Writing for a Change, and I’m rediscovering the joy I used to feel putting words, any words, down on paper. But that’s not all… I’m also hearing words, poetry, essays, short stories, rich language that feeds me images and keeps me from burning out.

In short, I’ve found my way back to the page. And this is what I know. Too much criticism, even good, well meaning, helpful feedback, can crush you under the weight of self doubt if you aren’t very, very careful.

You must remember to feed and tend to your inner writer. Set up play dates with other writers and serve Cosmopolitans. Buy your inner artist fancy journals and Precise V5 Pilot pens. Put gold stars at the top of her papers. But most importantly, never lose the sound of your own voice.

Resource Referral: Mentoring That Frees You by Monica Day

I watched Marcella go through the agony she describes above, and it wasn’t pretty. So when she sent me this essay, I was thrilled. But I wished the last year could have been easier on her. That’s not to say that she hasn’t learned a lot and grown tremendously as a writer…or that any of her mentors intended to torture her. But I did worry at times that she might get mentored to death!

That said, while four mentors is too many…every blooming copywriter should be working with a mentor. That’s why Krista and I created the Copy Protégé Mentoring Program.

The goal of the program is to:

• critique your copy
• help you stay focused on growing your business
• think through your marketing and networking efforts with you
• …and give you a swift kick in the pants when you need it

We can only work with a very small, intimate group of people – and when we first announced the program back in the Spring, we had such an overwhelming response that we had to start a waiting list. But by the end of today everyone who applied already will have heard from us – and we will still have a few more spots left for the next session.

The Copy Protégé Mentoring Program is not a first come, first serve kind of thing. Rather, we want to first assess your writing and hear your goals before we commit to take you on. We want to make sure you’re serious, and that you have already gotten some of the basics under your belt so that our time – and yours – is well-spent working together.

So here’s what you need to do to apply:

• You should already be a member of AWAI, and have completed or be working on the Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting.
• You should be a Copy Protégé reader…right now this program is open only to our subscribers…and finally,
• You must submit a sample headline and lead – no more than 2 pages please! – and a brief paragraph on what you hope to achieve in the next 3-6 months in your career to admin@copyprotege.com. When you send your sample, also let us know whether you have a preference between working with me or Krista.

Once you drop us a line and let us know you’re interested, we’ll assess your sample and send you more particulars about the program, including the cost, timeframe and everything it includes. I think you’ll be pleased. Our hope is that, for a handful of you, this will be just what you need, at exactly the right time in your career. If that sounds like you, send you sample right away. We anticipate, from the number of people who applied the first time around, that we’ll fill up again fast.

We look forward to working with some of you!

Quick Marketing Tip: What You Can Learn From First Day Jitters

My two children marched off to their first day of school this morning – one in kindergarten, the other in 4th grade. I’m sure in a few short weeks – or maybe even days – the usual complaints will start. My older one – a.k.a. the dramatic one – is fond of saying, “But Mom, school takes over my life.” And I have to remind her that for the next 10 or more years, school is her life.

But nothing could curb their enthusiasm this morning. The prospect of seeing old friends, meeting new friends, discovering whether they will like their new teacher or not…their stomachs resembling the Butterfly Garden at our local natural history museum.

As adults, we forget the fortitude and courage it takes to face things like the first day of school, birthday parties and the myriad of social situations children have to navigate. When was the last time you got up the nerve to go up to someone and ask them if they want to play? Can you even imagine? Most of us can hardly do it without downing a half a bottle of wine and keeping our best friend at our side at all times.

And yet networking and making connections is one of the most powerful ways to establish and maintain any business – especially when you are self-employed. You simply can’t afford to leave your enthusiasm for facing first days and first meetings to your childhood days. Instead, become child-like as an adult. Meet every person and every opportunity with the innocence and wonder of the first day of school – butterflies and all – and watch how big your circle gets in the playground.