Tag Archives: writing habit

The Timer Is Your Friend

 

A few years ago, a trusted mentor (a well-established writer and generally wise woman) told me: “Write for twenty minutes a day . . . period.”

“What?” She had to be joking. I knew my own writing process; I’d been writing for many years. It took me an hour just to warm up. The good stuff didn’t start happening until the second or third hour. “There’s no way I’m going to write anything of value in twenty minutes,” I said, and I explained my writing process to her, thinking she would drop this tack and come up with another that suited me better.

But she pressed on, insisting I give it a try. I had come to her in a quandary. I wasn’t writing at all. I had a particularly full plate at the time, editing and coaching other writers, and didn’t feel I had any energy or creativity for my own writing. Every time I tried to get back to my own project, my paying work received less time and attention than it needed. Ultimately, I would end up ditching my own writing again in order to catch up with my “day job.”

The cycle kept repeating. It began to seem an impossible juggling act.

So I took my mentor’s guidance and tried writing for a measly thirty minutes a day (yes, I’d negotiated an extra ten minutes!). After trying this out for a couple of weeks, the same thing happened that always happened. My energy poured into my own writing, and my other work suffered.

I came back to my mentor for further guidance.

“Did you stop when the timer went off?” she asked.

“Well . . . no,” I confessed. “But I kept getting on a roll . . . and you don’t want to interrupt a writing flow, right?” I had ended up writing for an hour or two each time.

“Stop when the timer goes off,” she said. “If you’re excited about what you’re writing when you stop, you’ll be excited to sit down the next day to pick up where you left off.”

So, I tried one more time. I had been “granted permission” to make some notes when the timer went off, so I wouldn’t lose track of the good ideas that were bubbling up, but other than that, I intended to obey the timer.

Well, the following weeks, and months, brought quite a surprise. I got to learn that my writing process was not as fixed a feature of my personality as I’d thought. I wrote four chapters over those few months, writing for only thirty minutes a day, five days a week, and usually producing less than a page in each sitting. In this slow-and-steady manner, I finished the first draft of that novel (and my paying work didn’t suffer for it).

Sure when I read over those chapters at the end of those months, they were a little rougher than something written in a series of three-hour sessions. But they were written, which was much more than I’d been accomplishing with my prior tack.

Now when a client or student tells me, “I just don’t have the time to write,” I ask: “Do you own a timer?”

Establishing a Writing Habit

 

I tell my students and clients all the time (gently yet emphatically): “You’ve got to establish a writing habit.” It’s about opening up the channels so the creative juices can flow. Once those channels are open and flowing daily (at least 5 days a week), writing becomes second nature, resistance dissipates, and projects begin to write themselves. . . .

So, why has it been weeks (or months?) since I’ve had my own regular writing habit? Why have I put off writing a blog for . . . oh, five or six years now? When others ask, “How’s the writing going?” my answer is, “Oh, I’m not doing much of my own writing . . . I’m helping other people write.”

This is true, and it’s a good excuse, right? Altruistic? Noble? Of service? Or . . . am I doing what my clients and students do when they say, “Oh, I have a really busy schedule” or “How can I write every day when I’m not inspired every day?” or “I sat down to write but I ended up on Facebook.”

Often, beneath any of these excuses is a darker, more hidden reason for resisting writing:  Fear.  We know that as soon as we sit down to the computer, that snarky little voice inside our head is going to start growling at us, telling us how pathetic we are as writers. It’s an unpleasant—even painful experience—so naturally we resist it. Naturally we fear it. The thing is, we’ve got to sit down anyway. We’ve got to sit down, and sit down, and sit down, despite the snarking little voice. For many, sitting down daily to write will get them past this incessant Inner Critic. The channels will open and the voice will grow quiet, or at least faint, or may even disappear all together . . . at least intermittently. For others, the voice will continue to snark no matter how often you write. If you’re one of these people, you’ve just got to keep reminding yourself that anything the Inner Critic says is inherently . . . a big fat lie.

One trick I like to pass on to my students is this: If your Inner Critic is on a particularly gnarly rampage one day, just write badly. Yes, that’s right: Write crap. (Try it out and let me know what happens!) It’s kind of an aikido move: If someone comes at you with an attack, join their energy, rather than resisting it. It’s also similar to Anne Lamott’s “mantra,” shitty first draft (I didn’t swear in cyberspace; I’m just quoting!). The premise is if you give yourself permission to write as badly as your Inner Critic says you will . . . sooner or later, you’ll probably have a few gems slip in under the radar. You may even end up writing something really good. But you can’t get attached to that result; you’ve got to give yourself total permission to write badly.

So, as I finally set out on what has felt like a monolithic task of blog writing, I’m sitting in my chair at my computer, feverishly chanting . . . “Shitty first draft! Shitty first draft! Shitty first draft!” . . . Won’t you join me?