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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5430 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is just a guess, but I think it sounds like you are struggling with perfectionism. Words enter your brain, and if they aren't "perfect" (or nearly so) on the first pass, you feel stress and discard them, which results in a feedback loop that leads to writer's block.

Conventional advice I've heard to address this is to just "word vomit" garbage onto the page. Once enough material flows through you, you'll be able to piece it back together into something that's okay.

In my personal experience, alcohol has helped, but I would recommend against that being a long term solution. In addition to being unhealthy, drugs can change the way you think enough to break feedback loops and mental traps.

It would be a fairly self-flattering explanation if this were the case, but while I can't quite rule out that the pattern you describe is accurate (and simply leads to the end result being as it is because of some sort of semantic saturation), it does seem like the results I wind up with if I force out the text in unproductive state really are that bad.

"Just because you are perfectionist doesn't mean that the thing isn't actually not good enough", or something?

Remind yourself that anything you do is just a first draft, so it's ok if it sucks.

it does seem like the results I wind up with if I force out the text in unproductive state really are that bad.

This is to be expected. There is a reason I called it "word vomit." Once its all down, you can come back and re-arrange the pieces the next day and it may be a lot easier to get somewhere with it. I've had middling luck with this approach.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I've heard that changing your text editor to Comic Sans helps a lot.

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