What sets good writing apart from the mediocre? It is a question every writer faces, regardless of experience. After 113+ published books and 54+ ghostwritten, I have an answer that took me decades to learn: good writing comes from the heart, not the head.
Why Does Overthinking Kill Good Writing?
You can still produce words, but they do not carry anything worth reading twice.Share on X
The worst thing I can do when starting a new writing project is put too much pressure on myself to generate the perfect idea. There is something about overthinking that kills the essence of good writing. For more, see writing good dialogue. This applies especially to fiction, but the principle holds across everything I write. For more, see point of view in fiction.
For the better part of four decades, I wanted to be a writer. But the demands of life got in the way. I spent 33 years in the corporate world, holding high-pressure jobs in the computer industry. I produced technical articles, books, manuals, and guides. They were competent. None of them reflected what I actually thought or felt. The corporate environment rewarded precision and structure, not voice and vulnerability.
The stress of that life created a barrier between me and the creative work I wanted to do. When your mind is consumed by deadlines, budgets, and organizational politics, the deeper part of your imagination goes quiet. You can still produce words, but they do not carry anything worth reading twice.
Writing From the Heart
The turning point came when I stopped relying on my brain for ideas and started writing from emotional truth. My fiction transformed. Characters that had been arrangements of traits on a page became people with real feelings and contradictions. Stories that had been competent became alive.
Our brains have limitations shaped by education, professional training, and social conditioning. These frameworks are useful for technical writing and structured arguments. They are terrible for fiction. They confine your thinking to what is logical, expected, and safe. Good fiction is none of those things.
The heart does not operate within those constraints. Writing from the heart means allowing yourself to explore ideas that feel true even when they are not logical, characters who behave in ways that are messy but honest, and stories that go places you did not plan. The best scenes I have ever written surprised me while I was writing them.
Creating Conditions for Good Ideas
You cannot force good ideas through deliberate thinking and relentless brainstorming. Ideas emerge when you create the conditions for them and then get out of the way.
For me, relaxation and immersion in activities that have nothing to do with writing open the door. Walking, exploring a garden, photography, pursuing a hobby. These give the conscious mind something to do while the subconscious works on the real problem. The ideas that arrive during a walk are almost always better than the ideas I grind out at my desk.
Stress kills this process. When your mind is burdened with anxiety, you cannot access the deeper parts of your imagination. Stress creates a fog that makes everything feel urgent and nothing feel creative. The first step toward better writing is often not a writing technique at all. It is finding a way to reduce the noise in your life enough to hear your own ideas.
How This Applies to My Work
This is why my ghostwriting process starts with interviews, not outlines. When I sit down with a client, I am not asking them to deliver a structured argument. I am asking them to talk about what matters to them, what they have experienced, what they believe. The best material comes out when clients stop trying to sound impressive and start telling the truth about their experience.
The same principle applies to the fiction writers I coach. The ones who produce the best work are not the ones with the most detailed outlines. They are the ones willing to follow a character into uncomfortable territory and write what they find there. Technique matters. Craft matters. But underneath all of it, the writing has to come from something real, or the reader feels the difference.
My advice is simple. Find a quiet space. Let your mind wander. When ideas come, write them down but do not immediately try to build the whole story. Let them sit. Come back later and see which ones still have energy. Those are the ones worth pursuing.
For structured approaches to breaking through creative blocks and finding your best material, see the Brainstorming Guide for Writers and the Writer’s Block Handbook.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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