still more on writing

[mamajoan]

Here's the other thing: I'm not as free of self-censorship as I used to be. When I was a teenager writing crap that I now blush to think of, and even the first few years I wrote fanfic, I could dash it off in a snap, because I was so [confident | arrogant] that I knew it would be good and didn't need to be thought about a whole bunch.

Then I wrote Learning The Ropes and it was ... an adventure. Perhaps bearblue will agree. ;-) It was so freeing to write characters that were so ... I want to say amoral, but that's not it, uninhibited let's say. And it was Uberfic, so the characters were mine and yet weren't. I made them mine, and they were such fun. So liberating for me. I still think that may have been one of the best things I ever wrote simply from an expressing-myself point of view, even if someone reading my more recent stuff might not agree in a strictly quality-related sense.

But after that I seem to have lost the ability to just write, so freely like that. Now it comes a lot harder. I second-guess myself every half paragraph. It's frustrating. How can I get back that easy facility with words, that flow from brain through fingers to screen? Or is it gone forever? :(