Effective vs. ineffective writing

Creative writing - From think to ink - Lindstrom Simeon 2015

Effective vs. ineffective writing

Writing is a habit that you can develop just like you can develop other habits. This chapter is all about ineffective, inelegant and inefficient ways to write, and how you could remedy them to make better use of your time, energy and creativity.

Procrastination

Ok, here it is. Here’s the section on procrastination.

The best thing you can do to kill this filthy habit is to understand why you do it. For many writers, procrastination is protective. You’ve convinced yourself you’re not good enough, you’re scared of failure, scared of the effort, and so you put it off with fantastic excuses so that eventually, you can look back and say, “see? I can’t do anything.”

If this is you, you need to start small.

Give yourself lots of opportunities to prove yourself wrong. Don’t make grand plans, just give yourself assignments you know you can do. Write 100 words one day. Praise yourself. Write 200 the next day. Don’t catastrophize if you fail, just ask yourself why and then get back on it the next day. 300 words. And so on.

A good technique is to just start. Promise yourself that no matter what happens, you’ll at least sit down for five minutes every day, come hell or high water. What usually happens is you get stuck into it and want to carry on writing after all.

If you procrastinate because you’re a lazy bastard, like me, then there’s no way around it: you have to stop being a lazy bastard, and that’s about all.

Choose your most productive time of day (for me, it’s the morning) and then schedule your writing for then. Write no matter what. Tell others if their knowing would push you to write each day. Reward yourself if it helps. Say affirmations in the mirror, track your progress with an app or say a little prayer and remember your Big Why every time you feel like you’d rather watch TV and veg out than write.

It doesn’t really matter what “tips and tricks” you use — at the end of the day, you either write or you don’t. You either reach your goal, or you don’t. This is not a motivational book (can you tell?) and I can’t say exactly what will be the most inspiring thing for you, but I can say this: you could watch TV instead of write. You could put this off till tomorrow, or next week. Or, you could be better than that. Decide what you want and do it. There are millions of hopeful, unfulfilled authors out there who will never amount to anything, but there are zero authors who are successful who got there by watching TV and vegging out. The choice is yours.

Perfectionism

Do you notice how often people claim perfectionism as one of those “good vices” — you know, a bit like caring too much or being too handsome? Fact is, perfectionism is one of the worst habits you can have. Perfectionists often end up producing the least, and having the hardest time with criticism. Perfectionists never finish. At root, the perfectionist is driven by fear, and as long as that fear is in place, growth will be limited.

It takes courage to be in process. What I mean is it takes a lot of guts to look at yourself, as you are right now, and accept it. You may think you are motivating yourself by being harsh and having impossible standards, but what you are really doing is shutting yourself off from the very process that would actually make you better.

This is because failing is an intrinsic part of succeeding. The messy business of trial and error is actually the place where you learn to be excellent. If you’re unwilling to dwell in that vulnerability and uncertainty — you don’t learn, plain and simple. And so “perfection” becomes stubbornness, pride and stagnation.

Routinely tell yourself it’s OK to mess up. In fact, plan to mess up. Reframing “mess ups” as your goal. Mistakes and imperfect attempts are really just a way to learn, and if you accept them for that, they’re not so scary any more. Laugh at yourself a little. Shrug off looking like a fool — you won’t die. Switch your goal temporarily from quality to quantity. Just write — you can edit and “fix it” later.

Disorganization

You wander, lonely as a cloud, and tumble into a quaint coffee shop that speaks to your heart. You sit down and curl yourself round a hot chocolate, taking out your Moleskin notebook and pink pen, ready to start the day’s writing. You’re distracted for the next 10 minutes thinking about whether to order cake and then your friend calls and you spend the 10 minutes after that having a chat. Then you remember that you actually have to be in town in an hour and a half and so you cut your dreamy writing session short. You’ve only written one line, but that’s OK, these things can’t be rushed. You’ll try again that evening.

Except that evening, you’re tired, and you realize that whoops! you left your beautiful notebook at the café. Your table is covered with quilting supplies anyway so even if you had your notebook you wouldn’t have anywhere to sit and write. But you went to the café this morning, so that counts, right? The next morning you write “characters” at the top of a loose piece of paper and brainstorm some random ideas. You lose that paper the following day while talking to your friend on the phone again…

This, ladies and gentlemen, is disorganization, and it’s not cute.

I don’t mean to crush your artist’s spirit, but at some point, you’re going to need files. You’re going to need a dedicated place to write and a space in your schedule that’s cordoned off for this and nothing else. You’ll need paper, mountains of it, and a way to organize it. You’ll need files on your computer and they’ll need to be organized logically, where you can get at them. You’ll need a small notebook to carry with you and endless, endless pens.