If you could lift the lid on my brain, you’d see a jazz band of doubters and disbelievers, clinging and clanging and tooting their horns.

I face them every time I write and it exhausts me and, sometimes exhausts my family and friends.

When I write, I worry what people will think of me, that I'll be insensitive or unkind, silly or dumb--that I'll appear "big-headed," as my Norwegian roots forever warn me against.

Yet I don’t know anyone who doesn’t face it.

In an interview in the children's book blog, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Chris spoke about his efforts to quiet what he calls the “critical mind.”

“In the fourth rendition of Little Black Crow, I worked in a quiet studio—the radio was off—in an attempt at better concentration. My concentration proved to be good, perhaps too good, in that I had trouble turning off my critical mind.”

“Turning the music back on allowed me to go with the flow of the day, at the end of which I can just shrug and say to myself that it’s what happened to happen today, we’ll see if we like it tomorrow.”

Chris often delays or contains the critical mind in order to work. When he wrote Seriously, Norman!, he didn’t reread or edit it until he’d finished a complete draft, at which point he printed it out then turned on his critical mind. Like flipping a switch to tap into that now useful part of the brain.

Music distracts me too much, but one technique I’ve adopted is to contain my writing within one 20-minute time period at a time. It’s easier to quiet my critical mind for short interludes, I find.

Another technique borrowed from Anne Lamott, is using imagery, for example, by rounding up the critical voices, putting them in a jar, tightening the lid and watching them silently mouth off behind glass.

More ways to quiet the critical mind:

1. The BIG picture: Death looms. Don't waste time fretting.

2. Get feedback from a trusted source.

3. Ignore analytics and metrics (forget audience).

For those who want to try music to mute the critical mind, I’ll include a list from Chris. Classical music requires too much of his attention, he finds, so he goes with his own eclectic mix of jazz, crooner classics, folk and pop: Sun Ra, The Lucksmiths, Biz Markie, Kirsty MacColl, Noel Coward, Television, Drink Me, Charlie Parker and anything on WFMU.