If you’re anything like me, you are terrified of your computer. There it is, sitting by the window on your kitchen table. It’s lookin’ all innocent, sayin’, “Hey. Hey man. Come get some writing done.” And you tell yourself, “I’m going to face my fear of this talking computer, sit down, and write.”

But then once you get there, your hands start shaking and your legs start jimmying. You open up every other possible application on your dock, go to web sites you’d never normally go to, check the weather for the next three years, and finally get sucked into a game of Web Boggle.

Why does this happen? Well, let me just let the non-writers who stop by in on a little secret: Writing is…SO. MUCH. WORK. All right, that’s exaggerating a little bit. But usually, it’s not what you would call “fun.” In my limited experience, the only people I’ve met who “enjoy” writing are those drafting personal essays, because, well, they’re writing about themselves. (Can you even begin to grasp the irony of a blogger making such a statement?)

For the rest of us, there’s hours of planning and character background and “off the page” scenes and yadda-yadda. After that? It all sucks. Or, at least we think it does. It’s like that typical sitcom one night stand: The first night you have an idea, it’s the sexiest thing in the world. You love it. You wonder where it’s been your whole life. You take it home. Hop in the sack with it. It’s the greatest night of your life.

Then you wake up the next morning and wonder what the hell you were thinking.

That’s writing. It’s constantly second-guessing or wondering if you could have done better. I’ve written a few times now that you should enjoy your writing and make it entertaining for you. That’s really me talking about the best case scenario. Those few moments when you have “fun” are the goal, but it takes a lot of digging to get there. But you have to wonder if it has to be like that. This is supposed to be some type of art, isn’t it? You have to be personal, don’t you?

There’s probably a middle-ground somewhere. So I present to you a few wise words from Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park, on a more spontaneous approach to writing (from this interview with The A.V. Club):

AVC: Why do you create the show on such a tight, grueling schedule?

TREY PARKER: Actually, it’s been interesting, because we’ve tried many times, and last year was the last time we really tried—we came in over the summer and said, “Let’s just do some stuff. There’s no deadline, there’s nothing.” And we wrote and directed and created some of the worst crap we’ve ever made in our entire careers. I always like, in the interviews too, I like to fancy myself more of a musician than anything else, but it really is—for me, writing an episode of South Park, it’s like sitting down and writing a song. When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there’s some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there’s this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can’t even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it. Things are so workshopped and so run around the room, and so overthought. And finally, once you have a draft and then a draft of the draft, then they go in there and they work on every single little joke, and “Is there a gag here? Is there something here?” You would never do that with a song. You would never sit around for a month and talk about what a song should sound like, and what the chorus is going to be. To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There’s that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, “This could be really funny.” And you sit down and you write it. There’s just something that happens there that doesn’t happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand. And that’s basically my long-winded answer of saying I’m a procrastinator. [Laughs.]

I really love this here analogy. All that procrastinating I wrote about in the first few paragraphs comes about from overthinking to the point of writer’s paralysis. And there’s no need.

Now, this isn’t me telling you it’s OK to be lazy. There’s a difference between half-assing and simply writing because something at that particular moment affected you. Using the former technique, you wind up with underdeveloped characters in underdeveloped plots. The latter technique contains sincerity. It’s not trying to be anything, it just is. And this is what makes great writing.

So give it a try. Like any writing technique, it will probably work for you sometimes and be your downfall on other days. Plus it should be noted that Trey Parker and his buddy/South Park partner have been working on this show for about ten years now. So it’s probably second nature at this point. But it’s worth it to try and explore new approaches to your craft. And it’s good for your brain.

That’s it for now. Oh, and I’m a college graduate. Smell ya later, Emerson.