I go back and forth. On the one hand, sitting down and dumping words into a text document when one is feeling superlatively unenthused is almost certain to result in so many words of hot garbage. On the other hand, isn’t it better than not writing at all?
As a wise woman once told me, you can’t edit a blank page.
More times than I can count, I’ve deliberately tossed some jello word salad onto a page just to get my fingers moving across the keyboard (or my pen across the paper). The first paragraph or two are bad, maybe even beyond repair; but about half the time, what comes next is anything from passable to pure magic.
Only once have I forced myself to write and ended up with something so abjectly irredeemable that the memory of it rendered me unable to write for months.
Given the relative likelihood of each outcome, I say go for it. If you’re afraid of writing something that doesn’t sound good, tell yourself it’s a free form outline, or a throwaway first draft, or the way you’d write it if you were a mentally disturbed, very hungry ferret. Just write!
– AK