Get Over Yourself and Start Writing in Comic Sans
Anyone who writes for fun or profit is afraid to sit down to work only to end up staring at a blank document for hours. The writer block comes to all of us sooner or later , but the solution all this time could be hiding in your font menu.
While my cooking style is best described as a lightly controlled tornado, I write painfully, painstakingly, and slowly. I constantly delve into the bottomless pits of editing, obsessively cutting, pasting and controlling one sentence before letting myself move on. Generous people might call this strategy “demanding” or even “methodical,” but I know this is just another procrastination strategy. I get complete satisfaction from my job and all the comfort of putting it off until the last minute – until the deadline creeps in and makes me regret every choice I’ve ever made in my life. Nothing I’ve tried improved my workflow as noticeably and immediately as switching my font to Comic Sans.
The whole point of Comic Sans is that each letter is completely different from the others. This is why dyslexic people love this font : irregular letters make it easier to break down words into their constituent parts and interpret them correctly. If all b looks like p, which also resemble q and d, or maybe even g, it is much more difficult to do this.
Even though I have the opposite problem – I don’t need help validating my writing at the syllable level, thank you – writing Comic Sans helped me break the ineffective habits that I clung to since college. All the words merge into a cohesive mass that I can treat as a whole, instead of immediately taking apart the words, so I write faster and smoother. It’s never a bad thing for a freelancer.
To show you what I mean, here’s a 13 point excerpt from my last Times New Roman post :
And here it is in 13-point Comic Sans:
I can read a copy of Comic Sans without taking my eyes off my eyes, which is more than I can say for those same words in Times New Roman.
If you’re struggling with a writing block or overly picky self-editing, try setting your word processor’s default font to Comic Sans. Just do it. Your inner aesthetic snob will protest loudly at first, but the sound of finished projects will drown out these screams pretty quickly. Also, you can always change the font in the CMS.