Have writer's block? Delete your drafts.

Listen up, losers: We can tell when your posts are made with an audience in mind and we don’t like it. It sounds like ChatGPT, it is the lowest possible denominator of posting, and, worst of all, it’s boring.I come to you with a solution: Delete your drafts. It’s a strategy I learned with a fair bit of hesitance — why work so hard just to trash it all — but one that’s paid off. My journey in deleting began in 2022 when I attended a writers workshop in need of a creative reset. I was paralyzed not with fear but with an obligation to an imagined reader. After years of getting paid to write, I had stopped writing it for the good of the story and started writing it for an audience — the Mashable audience, the NPR audience, or some other invented audience that might enjoy the piece, take something from the piece, and, importantly, give me money for writing the piece. Soon enough, a good idea had been reduced to something boring, watered-down from its initial promise.  The pressure creatives feel to constantly produce content for an audience — and ultimately for validation — can ruin our ability to actually create interesting work.My mentor at the workshop recommended I try something new: Write the work and let my brain take it where it takes it, whether that’s with an audience in mind or not, and when I felt it was perfected — that moment I would typically send it to an…Have writer's block? Delete your drafts.