You begin to think of critical readers and how they will react. You get worried and your mind begins to cloud. You start trying to clench your mind around what pitiful little lumps of material you have in your head so as not to lose them. But as you try to clarify one thought, all the rest seem to fall apart. There are all manner of negative feelings we sometimes encourage when we try to write and we need to confront them and try to work through them.
Elbow promotes powerful writing by challenging existing the existing orthodoxy about good writing.
We are told constantly to think out what we want to write before we start writing, to write following a plan, an outline, in essence to do our thinking before we even start writing. There is, in this traditional approach to writing, often as much focus on planning as on writing itself. It is, we are told, only after thinking through what we want to achieve with writing that we then set out to write. Meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with. Control, coherence, and knowing your mind are not what you start out with but what you end up with.