Douglas Adam's Writing Advice to Himself

Douglas Adams wrote this letter to himself - text below if you’re struggling with the handwriting - before he made it big with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was discovered among his papers after his death. 

There’s so much I love about it …

The practical advice: to just press on and get something down that you can rework later, without worrying if it’s any good while you’re writing. 

The approach of taking the time to write to yourself in the second person: it’s a really good strategy if you find yourself overwhelmed by your creative demons. 

The prescience, against the odds, of that final sentence.

But, most of all, I love that it reveals a simple truth about the creative process: no one, no matter how talented, is immune from self-doubt. And sometimes knowing this is all you need to give you the courage to keep going.

—

Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them. Give yourself time, you can come back and do it again in the light of what you discover about the story later on. It’s better to have pages and pages of material to work with and sift and maybe find an unexpected shape in that you can then craft and put to good use, rather than one manically reworked paragraph or sentence. 

But writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it …!