How to repair your relationship with your creative brain.

Your Inner Critic, Inner Censor, or Voice of Reason. Whatever you call them, the voice in your head is holding you back. This stops today.

Welcome to my Weekly Email Newsletter! Every Friday I do a deep dive into an aspect of the craft and business of screenwriting from a literary manager’s perspective.

Today’s post is for subscribers only. If you’re new here, I recommend checking out the free posts at this link to sample what this newsletter has to offer.

Otherwise, keep reading for my insights on re-enabling your creativity.

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You are your own worst enemy as a writer.

Many obstacles get in the way of a writer being productive. Schedules are busy, families are demanding, and inspiration just doesn’t seem to come when you want it. All of these are easily combatted if you are in a motivated and creatively healthy headspace.

But this is easier said than done for many writers.

The world we live in isn’t kind to artists. As a result, you have been trained to not be kind to yourself. This self-abuse results in Writers’ Block (or general procrastination).

If you haven’t been writing as much as you would like or if you haven’t been generating the kinds of creative ideas that you are capable of, it’s time to take a look under the hood and take your brain to Couple’s Therapy.

Luckily, there are techniques you can employ to address this.

Remember when…?

No matter who you are, there was a time when this was not a problem for you.

Do you remember what it was like to be a child? You played make believe on the playground. You invented worlds and kingdoms with your toys as players. You imagined scenarios on long car rides or as you were drifting off to sleep.

When you were very little, you didn’t know to be insecure.

You weren’t aware that there was a right way to play and a wrong way to play. You certainly didn’t worry about the Inciting Incident of your adventures. You dove in and you had fun. You were messy. You got in trouble.

You probably hurt a classmate or neighbor’s feelings.

Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash

We have been trained to self-police.

It was in going to school and learning how to interact with others that you first started being trained in controlling your own thoughts and behaviors.

This is, of course, a good thing. We live in a society, and we can’t all just run around willy nilly doing whatever we want and hurting or offending people. We need to work together, we need to understand that there is a time and a place for letting our imagination soar, and we need to hold back on words that could cause harm.

The adults in your life who taught you this had your best interests at heart.

They wanted you to be kind, responsible, safe, and accepted by the community.

And if you are reading this, you indeed managed (at least to a certain extent) to achieve all those things. You don’t life with your parents anymore, and you don’t have a teacher telling you what to do each minute of the day, but you have internalized their lessons into a self-regulating voice.

This is your Inner Critic, and she is here to help.

She has gotten you this far, and you owe a lot to her.

But now when you open Final Draft and start trying to work on the latest pages of your script, her voice is getting in the way.

“You’ll never be good enough.”

“It’s too late for you.”

“Don’t you remember reading that other professional script? This isn’t even close to that caliber of writing. You should just quit now.”

It’s going to be impossible to move forward on your project if you keep hearing this voice. And even if you can manage to muscle through with willpower, it’s not going to be fun. You will inevitably burn out.

Building a career in screenwriting is not for the faint of heart.

As a literary manager, I have seen countless writers burnout after just a couple of professional jobs and even more before they even managed to break through. People in this industry can be cruel. There is not a lot of encouragement or positive reinforcement to be found because executives are driven by fear and reps by the need to make money.

No one wants to coddle a writer who is having an emotional block.

So, if you are experiencing one yourself, I have laid out here some actionable techniques you can use to resolve this tension and open up that creative faucet again.

Once you repair your relationship with your own creative brain, the ideas will start flowing and you will not only be productive every day, but you will actually fall in love with writing again.