These paragraphs really hit home for me:

“When I first tried to get back into painting as an adult, after many years away from it, I immediately made the whole thing unbearable. I felt I had lost time. I felt embarrassed by how much skill had gone dormant.

[…]

I went into it with a clenched body and a very small window of tolerance for uncertainty, failure, or even perceived failure. I wanted to prove that I was serious. I wanted to become excellent quickly. I wanted to live up to my former self, my admired artists, my ambitions, all at once.

[…]

I was obsessed with the outcome. I cared only about whether the finished thing measured up to the ideal in my head. The process itself was full of anxiety, frustration, anticipation of failure, and a running current of self-criticism so relentless that it was often physically painful because I found myself bracing for impact.

Of course I started to avoid it.”

This was me last year with writing; I knew I wanted to get back into it, but I was so ashamed at not having done it for years and about how rusty I was that I just avoided it. Avoided it. Avoided it. But I had an idea that wouldn't leave me alone, and around the same time I came across a concept called "dump-doccing." Where you take a document and just DUMP all your ideas into it willy nilly, not caring about how pretty the words are or whether the sentences have great structure or whether your metaphors are mixed, etc.

And wow, holy wow. In a complete reversal of the way I usually wrote in the past, judging each word that I wrote, worried whether this scene fit with the rest of the story, is this character developed enough, I just threw all my ideas into that document. That was July 2025, and now, I have over 500 pages of material.

In dump docc'ing, I found the joy of talking to myself and to the characters, of thinking out loud about the plot and making real-time decisions about things, but letting everything I wrote stay there as an homage to the process. In looking back, I didn't capital-W Write a story, I dreamed and played it into being, the joyful chaos of it all, so much material that I crashed my writing program Scrivener by having too many words in one document and had to separate the behemoth into 7 different documents.

I just have fun, not worrying about anything and have come up with ideas that I am looking forward to writing down and crafting into a story, rather than worrying about crafting the story ahead of time. If that makes sense.

Anyway...all of your essays are so timely for me, and this one especially, because your story about playing with watercolor swatches reminded me so much of playing my story into existence rather than forcing it to fit a pre-conceived notion, and seeing the organic wonderful outcome I'd have never been able to create if I had tried to Write A Story About [Topic] from the get-go.