I struggle to give credit to all the important work that is part of writing.

I think that work can be roughly sorted into three categories:

The feeding of the inspiration, the writing itself, and the support work to sell the writing.

My internal critic and manager gets in my own way for two out of three of those categories. When left to my own devices, when I don’t push myself to act otherwise, I will chase writing to the exclusion of all the other important supporting efforts. This means that—unless I push myself—I do no research into technique, no recharging of my creative batteries, no research into selling my writings nor marketing of myself or my work. Somewhere inside me, whichever critical managerial part of me is responsible for deciding what work counts as being productive—and therefore worth enough to allow me to accept myself and my efforts as sufficient for a given day—never judged any of those pieces of work as acceptable.

Thus not only is that work difficult for me, doing that work is also never enough to convince my internal critic that my efforts were useful or worthy of acceptance. It’s never fun to reach the end of a day after doing a lot of work only for you to tell yourself that your work was useless and that you’ve done nothing. It’s bad enough when someone else is telling you that.

If I were playing soccer, I’d call this an own goal. It’s a whole series of them, really.

That internal critic, the one so obsessed with producing an ever larger word count to the exclusion of anything else, sees inspiration-seeking as frivolous. Inspiration-seeking is often fun. And if it’s that much fun, it can’t really count as work, can it? But when I don’t credit the vital task of going out and engaging with the world in search of inspiration, I stop feeling inspired to write.

Honestly, if I never did that inspiration-seeking I think my creative parts would shrivel up and die. Not giving that pursuit of inspiration credit, and being unwilling to accept the engagement with art as part of the work, is fundamentally self-defeating. Unless my inner critic wants my words to be dry, meaningless drivel, it’d best get out of the way.

Unfortunately, my inner critic also doesn’t judge any effort to sell my work as rewarding. If I spend an hour researching agents? Nothing accomplished. If I spend an hour reading about how to target ads for my self-published work, that’s something I should do in my spare time. It’s not really working, says that inner critic. Honestly, that inner critic is a cartoonishly toxic manager too obsessed with chasing a single metric to understand why the whole place is coming down around his ears, and too myopic to see what else besides him went into making any given project a success.

It’s no wonder, I suppose, that I feel at my most creative and most free when I’m able to slip into improv mode. If I’m collaboratively building something off the cuff, if I’m too deep in exploring something to pay attention to the critic and too busy coming up with the next thing to think hard about what’s going on, that critic shuts up—or maybe is just shunted aside. For whatever reason, that creative work counts, even if the critic doesn’t understand anything about the rest of the process.

I need a different solution for the long term, though. Wish me luck.