OMG don't you ever shut up, consciousness?

Out of all the activities humans perform, writing seems to be one of the most conscious. You're not born with the ability to write. You must learn it. And once you learn how, it's still not something you can do well without a whole bunch of practice and thinking and stuff. You have to develop a conscious sense of awareness of what good writing should look and sound like before you're capable of producing it.

"The mind is a great servant but a terrible master." This is quote I remember reading somewhere at some time. Over-thinking is often our biggest enemy. Once you develop a certain level of consciousness required for proficient writing, you must then develop the ability to ignore this consciousness at times.

This consciousness can be like asking your roommate for a little bit of honest criticism and your roommate taking it a little too far:

You: Dude, like, my girlfriend says I'm too careless about the little things. Do you think that's true?

Your Roommate: Yeah, I can see that.You always forget to lock the door when you leave. You routinely leave crumbs all over the kitchen and I'm always the one cleaning them up. You never put the toothpaste cap back on the bottle and then toothpaste gets all over the sink yet somehow you never even notice.  Hey! Hello?! There's a huge white blob all over the sink. My God. Is there a bird living in here and crapping on our sink? No. It's toothpaste that leaked out from when you refuse to put the cap back on literally every single day. It's so irritating. Not only are you careless about little things, you're also extremely inconsiderate of people around you. In fact, you're the most ego-centric person I know.

Criticism taken to this extreme is far more debilitating than constructive. So, as a writer, once your conscious reaches this point, you must learn to quiet it. You must learn to put some metaphorical earplugs in and focus on writing, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.

Some of the best work comes in moments in which you are not consciously thinking about what you're doing. You're just doing. I like to think of this as writing subconsciously.You must trust that your subconscious knows what it is doing.

I plan to further discuss the concept of channeling your subconscious in more detail next week's blog post. LATER HOMIES.

(P.S. My conscious mind wants me to take the opportunity to explain how unprofessional it was to end my post with the phrase "LATER HOMIES." It apologizes for the primitive nature of my subconscious.)