A member of my Raindance workshop emailed me to ask whether
I could recommend any ways to get over being too close to one’s own work to see
its faults.
The most useful approach is to treat the draft as though it had been written by someone else and they’d asked you for constructive criticism. The ways you can get that distance include:
- Print the draft in a different font and/or on different color paper (pale yellow is good—easy on the eyes);
- Read the draft in a different room (or a
different place altogether) than the one in which you created it;
- Sit back as you read the draft—this is the
critical posture, whereas leaning forward tends to be the creative posture
(which is why most of us writers have terrible posture);
- Note the problems you see with it, but resist
the temptation to come up with solutions at this point. That will be part of
the creative process.
- Experiment with the time of day that seems to work best for you in terms of making constructive criticism. I find in the first hour or so after waking up, my creative juices aren’t flowing but my critical faculties are. The opposite may be true for you—experiment to determine this for yourself.
