Don't Overthink

Writing is a very cerebral activity. It requires a lot of thinking. The problem is that it is easy to spend too much time thinking. When you have a big project you want to write, you spend too much time trying to figure out every tiny detail. When you want to do a small project, you spend too much time trying to perfect every tiny detail.

To echo the rallying cry of my own teachers, you're only a writer on days that you write. If you want to write something, then go ahead and write. You don't have to make it perfect. You don't even have to know what's going to happen next. Writing is just as much about discovery as it is about creation and fine-tuning.

I've heard it said that all of the pre-writing that a person does for a story constitutes about 20% of the whole story, and about half of it gets thrown out. So if you wrote a 100-page story, you only had about 10 pages of it in your head. The rest of it all came to you while you were writing. I can attest to that being true for me. I write my first drafts to figure out what the story is. After that, I trash it and start over, now knowing what the story is.

So if you find yourself being paralyzed by your desire to plan things out, stop it. Don't overthink. Just start writing what you know and figure out the rest of it as you go. Be a writer; write something.