How I write by John-Paul Flintoff

Top UK author, lifecoach and social entrepreneur J-P Flintoff writes this way:

"I used to spend a long time dreaming about how I intended to write something before I wrote it. I might do that at a table, with a cup of tea, or lying in bed in the morning, after everybody else had got up. But one day - after years working as a journalist, cranking the words out under pressure of deadlines - I realised that, in practice, I never wrote the way I had dreamed I would write. I often wrote something entirely different. I also realised that it was more fun that way - to have no idea what I was going to write until I wrote it. In the process, by actually writing, I learned my own mind. And I concluded that dreaming-about-writing was a waste of time. From then on, I decided only to write when I was writing, and to apply the same approach to other things to. Don't think about something if you can actually DO it. This has saved me an awful lot of time, and made me very productive. I have also, since then, been better able to a) enjoy my cup of tea as a cup of tea and b) get up at the same time as everybody else, and have breakfast together." John-Paul Flintoff, author of How To Change The World www.flintoff.org