How to Connect to Your Story

So you've started your story. It can feel like stepping onto ice for the first time: cautious, slightly unsure, and hyperaware of every move. The shiny ice is like a blank page, and you don’t know if you’re able to conquer it. 

So you start with your first lines, you describe a scene, you fill in your first dialogue, and come up with a metaphor. But then someone shows up uninvited.

You know who it is. Your inner critic. The voice that reads every sentence back to you in the worst possible tone. The one that says this is terrible before the paragraph is even finished. Your alter ego is relentless, oddly well-informed about all your weaknesses, and completely convinced that it is its job to protect you from embarrassment.

This kind of thinking isn't protecting you and your story; rather, it's just getting in the way.

Here's the thing about that voice: it only has power when you're thinking. The moment you stop writing and start evaluating, it moves in with sleath-like precision. So the answer to remove it from your head isn't to silence it through sheer willpower; it's to give that critical voice nothing to work with. How do you do that? You stay in the scene. Stay with your character. Follow the image that has been forming in your mind, not the idea. Start a sentence without knowing where it ends and find out where it leads you.

Write badly. Genuinely, freely, without apology. Not because bad writing is the goal, but because bad writing is how good writing gets born. A diamond pulled from the ground looks like a dirty rock. It's unglamorous, unpromising, nothing like what it will become. Your first draft is the same. It isn't meant to shine yet. It's just meant to exist, and you need to let it happen by not getting in the way.

The zone writers talk about, that feeling of words arriving faster than you can second-guess them, isn't reserved for people with more talent or more confidence. It opens up the moment you stop watching yourself write and simply write.

That's the only way in. And that is what I teach at my writing club retreats. I hope you join me.

Why this writing club retreat is so important to bring your story to life.

-Elle van Rijn