One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. 

—Lawrence Block, WD

I’m not a big believer in setting out to write a bad first draft. I don’t think it’s a good goal to have. We tend to live up to our expectations.

That said, it’s possible to have your Inner Critic get the best of you and stop you from writing at all. For this reason, you have to give yourself permission sometimes to write material you will end up trashing. Give yourself permission to write badly.

It’s definitely better to get something on paper than nothing at all. If you end up cutting and slashing or simply throwing every page in the “circular file,” so be it. The sound of a file hitting the recycle bin on a computer can actually feel quite good at times because it means your not attached to your writing—but at least you wrote something.

Also, give yourself permission to write well. And aim for this goal. The higher your expectations, the more likely you are to meet them.