So why do we need to kill this Watcher? Because he/she is our captor, the prison guard of the imagination, of creative expression.
The one who does not want us to be released to flow with our muse.
I am minded when I work on this process of the legitimate murder of infinite possibilities by allowing the Watcher to keep control.
Plato's allegory of the cave in "The Republic" comes winging into my thoughts.
In the cave the prisoners face a blank wall on which shadows are projected.
This is as close as the prisoners get to experience reality and therefore think it is reality.
The true philosopher is like a prisoner who has escaped from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows aren't reality, what is outside is real.
Of course if he went back inside to tell the prisoners who were still captive and told them what was outside, he would be ridiculed.
I liken Killing the Watcher to this process.
Get out of that cave, and then does it matter when you go back and tell those still captive what you have seen that you are ridiculed? At least you broke free.
One of the first things I ask students to do when I work with them on creative writing courses - whether it be online or at universities - is a little exercise I call "Drop the Slop".
Other people have called it different things but it is much the same process.
Julia Cameron in her excellent book "The Artist's Way" calls the process Morning Pages.
I have great respect for Cameron and her writings, have read them myself and would recommend "The Artist's Way" but I never called the process Morning Pages since I used to do the practice whenever I was stuck or just as a mental warm-up before the main work out (i.
e.
the story I was working on).
Night-shift workers who want to write a bestseller but who sleep till midday before committing to their writing won't be doing Morning Pages either.
Other people call it automatic writing.
Hell, it doesn't matter what it's called the process is fluid enough to be called anything.
I call it "Drop the Slop" because the term is evocative for me.
Basically get your self a pen and notepad (or if you can't face looking at your scrawly writing a keyboard will do, though it doesn't work as well for me) find some place to be alone where you are not going to be interrupted and just take half an hour or so to write about a thousand words.
That's roughly three to six pages of A4, the discrepancy in number being dependent on the size of your handwriting.
Just write.
Write out the slops.
In the UK there is a process in prisons called "slopping out" which is basically the taking out of the cells in the morning the bodily wastes or human excrement passed the night before.
So I use the metaphor to apply to getting rid of all the waste in your mind.
And to do this you've just got to get out of the way and dump the mental faeces on the page.
It's predominantly an unconscious process because it helps to write before you've thought about it As I wrote in Part One it is eminently desirable for growth and creativity to bypass Schiller's "watcher at the gates of the mind", the one who censors you, tells you how pathetic you are.
Bypass or even annihilate, terminate or grind into pieces.
Your gremlin in other words, your self-censor.
The process lets your creative writing out of the cave.
I've devised a full day's workshop around the concept of "the watcher at the gates of the mind" and it's astonishing the things we won't allow ourselves to express because of gremlins, censors and conditioning.
Drop The Slop will help you kill this Watcher.
What you need to do is just fill up those pages with whatever comes into your mind or psyche and not look at the results afterwards until you've done about ten days to two weeks of them.
Because if you do you will make judgements on them and the point of this exercise is not to judge the quality but to "Drop the Slops".
The self-criticisms, the doubts, the fears, the "I-can't-do's".
It's these kind of slops that stop us going forward in the first place.
And never, ever show these slops to anyone else.
Except when you are proud of the product.
After you have dropped the slops you see, good stuff might out.
When I tried this exercise for the first time I wrote a lot of drivel and obscenities.
After about four or five days I started this dramatic dialogue with myself that went on for about a year (on and off).
The other side of myself - what I dared call my Higher Self - used to rib me about spending too much time in the pub.
I used to riposte that a writer's job was a very lonely one - I lived alone then - and having spent all day at home working I needed to get out.
Higher Self wasn't having any of it: I was squandering my talent, get on with it.
(There have been times in my life when I have been the President of the United States of Procrastination.
) Anyway the dialogue became in places quite profound (well for me) and no longer was I dropping the slop.
Once you have dropped the slop you never know what might come out (if you'll excuse the expression.
) Give it a try.
Don't condemn yourself at looking at shadows on the wall when you are doing your creative writing, get out there and see the real stuff.
And when you come back and tell the prisoners who are still chained to the wall and they laugh at you, remember you've been somewhere they haven't.
And today's eccentrics are tomorrow's pioneers.
Cyril Connolly once said: "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.
" (Be mindful that the whole "Conversation with God" series was written by the author Neale Donald Walsch just turning up at the page and getting out of the way.
And look what it did for Mr Walsch.
)