How to write more: trick yourself
“There are two of you—one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write better keep tricking the one who doesn't.”
These words from Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés capture a real truth of writing life (and of course, the same goes for any difficult pursuit).
How to write more
How do you keep tricking the one of you who doesn’t want to write? On any given day, there are so many other things that feel as if they’re either more urgent, easier, or more fun.
Make it pleasurable
Our brains are wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure, so go with that! Make writing as pleasurable as possible. Create opening rituals (light a candle, spritz on your writing perfume, or brew a perfect cup of your favourite drink) and root into your big picture vision for what doing this writing will achieve for you in the long-term.
Create consistent cues
By always playing the same music (or white noise, or waves breaking, or coffee shop background noise) you set up your brain to recognise the cue that, “Oh, it’s writing time.” This can work surprisingly well to get you quickly into a state of focus, ready to do deep work.
Reframe writing as a treat to yourself
Framing this to ourselves as a deeply pleasurable, nourishing experience also helps. Try telling yourself that you ‘get to have writing time now’ rather than you ‘have to write next’ - see it as a gift you’re giving yourself, rather than an unpleasant obligation.
Write every day
Making it a daily habit also helps, because it makes it a non-negotiable part of your daily routine, which gives your brain less to resist (resistance is painful - if we can make the pain of resisting the habit greater than the pain of sitting down to write, writing will win out).
Lean into creativity - make it feel dreamlike
Steven King’s advice is to set up your writing routine to induce a dream-like creative state.
“Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule — in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk — exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.
The space can be humble … and it really needs only one thing: A door you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world that you mean business…”
King is a big advocate of setting up a daily writing routine and sticking to it - and although many of my clients initially resist the idea of creating a daily practice, most of them end up swearing by it.
Let it be simple
I think one of the issues with suggesting a regular writing practice is that, as well as seeming unsustainable or oppressive, it also seems too easy a solution to the thorny problem of writing your book. It’s not easy to carve out the time or to maintain the discipline. But it is a relatively simple solution.
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman
One of the deceptively tricky things about building a regular writing practice is that people seem to feel that there should be more to it. Just showing up every day, setting a timer for 10+ minutes and writing - it doesn't seem complicated enough, or expensive enough, or time-consuming enough to work.⠀
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One of my mentoring clients said, “I was surprised that we started so small – I really didn’t think it would work to start so simply. I didn’t think I’d get anything written in that time. I was really doubtful. I didn’t expect it to work and I thought it needed to be harder. But in fact, it just built on the small foundations so that after a while I was writing regularly for longer sessions, and in the end it was really effective.”⠀
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Isn't it interesting that we think it needs to be harder? What if we let it be simple? ⠀