You are encouraged to write badly—VERY badly

Performance anxiety. Men get it in bed. Women get it on modeling runways. Writers are often befallen by this scourge when staring at a blank computer screen or sheet of paper.

It’s the No. 1 cause of dreaded writer’s block, according to some of the craft’s top instructors.

When suffering from performance anxiety our minds jump ahead and think about the end product, addling us with fear that our writing won’t measure up. It might even embarrass us. That’s especially horrifying since writing basically lasts forever, particularly in the internet age.

But there’s a technique promoted by leading writing coaches like Julia Cameron – author of The Right to Write – that can free us from this mind trap. Cameron and her ilk invite us to write badly. In fact, start your new writing project committed to writing as badly as you can.

I know, it sounds counter-intuitive, even ridiculous. But I’ve tried it and can tell you that it works amazingly well.

Try it yourself. What you’ll find is that you don’t really produce horrendous copy, you simply produce … copy. Because you’ve set your expectations so low the anxiety goes into remission and the resulting output is not nearly as poor as you expected. After all, it’s just the first draft.

You might even start drumming your fingernails on the desktop and find yourself thinking, This isn’t so bad. Not great but I can work with it. I can shape it into something respectable, maybe even pretty damn good.

Anne Lamott is another famous writing coach who advocates writing lousy first drafts. In her terrific book Bird by Bird, she assures aspiring writers that even the best novelists write terrible first drafts. That’s just the writing process.

So sit down, start typing and stop worrying. Concentrate on the process, not the final product. Commit to writing badly and you’ll be surprised how freely and well you write.

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