More Tips to Get Unstuck
After writing my previous blog post, How to Keep Going, I kept coming up with more and more ideas about how to get yourself going again if you find yourself in the middle of a writing project and your motivation is lagging. So, behold my second post on the topic!
I may expand on some of these tips and techniques later but, for now, I decided to present them in a quick, list format. Choose one or two to try out this week and let me know if they help you get writing!
1) Give yourself a deadline. In a class that I’m taking with Dr. Peg Dawson on coaching to enhance executive functioning skills, she told us that the number one executive skills challenge reported by adults is task initiation—that is, overcoming procrastination and simply getting started on a task. The best way to get over this and make yourself get started? Impose a deadline. If you want to get something done, you need to give yourself a date by which it needs to be done. Otherwise, it’s just too easy to keep putting off. (Check out this funny and interesting TED talk that Peg recommended by Tim Urban on this very topic!)
2) Write yourself memos on the project. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. We put off working on something because we’ve set the bar so high. We want our writing to be GREAT, right off the bat, and we will do anything to avoid that feeling of floundering around like we have no idea where the project is going or and no guarantee if it will be any good. The end result? We don’t make progress. We can be stuck in avoidance for months.
When I was a doctoral student, I came up with my own system to get over this. Instead of starting the huge, formal document that would become my dissertation, one summer, I started writing myself memos. The focus of the memos varied – sometimes I gave myself the assignment of summarizing articles that I knew I’d rely on heavily in the write-up of my project. Other times, I wrote about the data—what I was noticing as I interviewed participants and trends that seemed to be emerging. I described my coding system and all of my measures. You get the idea. The end result was that, by the end of a summer, I had multiple pieces of my dissertation already written. I was able to collate a preliminary draft just by copying and pasting from the memos I had already written. And I had been able to start writing the memos at all simply because each one felt so informal and low-stakes.
3) Write a sentence starter that you’ll take out later. This is another little trick to get over resistance. One of the best pieces of advice on writing that I’ve ever heard came from the sociologist Howard Becker who said, “When you sit down to write, don’t dress your brain up in a tuxedo.” And yet so many of us do just that. We think we need to sound smart. Smarter than smart. The pressure to sound like we know it all can—you guessed it—keep us from getting started. So, write yourself a sentence starter to get the ball rolling:
This morning I read X article by XYZ author and what I’m really thinking about is …..
When I started this project, I had thought my data would show X. But it seems to be showing Y. This is so confusing/surprising/horribly inconvenient because …..
Simply fill in the rest of the sentence. When you exhaust your thoughts on that one, write yourself another prompt. You can delete the starters later. In the meantime, you’ve produced some writing.
4) Related, you could take writer Dani Shapiro’s advice to write with one particular audience member in mind. The person can vary depending on the project. Ms. Shapiro writes that she most often writes to her (deceased) father—imagining what he might make of her work and hoping to make him proud. Sometimes I write with a particular friend in mind, or even a public figure/author, if there’s someone who I think would particularly *get* what I’m working on, what I’m trying to say. For example, when I had a miscarriage and, later, I really wanted to write about it to try to process it for myself, I wrote a large portion of the essay with Chrissy Teigen in mind as my audience member. She had lost a baby and written about it, and I felt like she would understand. Thinking of her as my audience got me writing. Choose your own sympathetic audience and write to that person.
5) Start Julia Cameron’s practice of writing Morning Pages. If there is one magical practice to getting your writing and indeed your entire self unblocked, it’s writing Morning Pages. Morning Pages are three, longhand notebook pages that you write to yourself first thing each morning. These pages are magic. In my experience, they help you sort through what you actually think about issues, get all of your mental clutter out of the way, and even manifest what you want in your life. I know that sounds pretty out there, so I’ll try to elaborate on that more in a later post. But, for now, suffice it to say that these pages really work for me. On a purely pragmatic level, Morning Pages take the sting out of writing. As Cameron writes, they get your pen moving—writing them regularly helps you learn to turn off your inner censor and trust what you’re producing, so that you can get it on the page.
6) In one of my favorite books, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Dr. Joan Bolker gives writers the tip of writing with a notepad beside them. The purpose of the notepad is to have a place to jot down every random to-do that occurs to you while you’re working on your project. Need to buy bananas? Write it down. Reschedule your dentist appointment? Don’t do it now, while you’re supposed to be writing. Train yourself to write down all of these little tasks that threaten to derail your progress. Get them out of your head and onto the paper, but don’t stop working on your project. When your allotted work time is up, all of your to-dos are nicely preserved for you, just waiting on your notepad.
7) When all else fails, use Pomodoros. Pomodoros—the system by which you work for 20 minutes and then take a 5-minute break—can get you going again because the time in which you’re meant to work is bounded, and relatively short. The key here is to actually take the 5-minute break. Don’t just power through the break, even if you’re on a roll. Stand up and walk around, do some stretches and take some deep breaths. In the long run, actually taking the break will keep you from burning out too soon. Don’t let academia turn you into a disembodied head. Your body matters too—get up and stretch!
8) Write outdoors. When I was on the faculty of the Harvard Writing Program, I had a colleague who had finished his dissertation by taking his sources to the Charles River (he had done his PhD at BU) and writing about them longhand there. The blank computer screen had him paralyzed, but the movement of the river, wind, and sunlight, not to mention the time away from email, the Internet, and other online distractions (he didn’t even bring his laptop) freed him up to write. Try it!
9) Start a Writing Ritual. In Deep Work (a book I loved!) Cal Newport talks about the importance of a shutdown ritual (something that you do every time you end a work/writing session to close out that session). One key piece of my own shutdown ritual is something I wrote about in the first How to Keep Going post—that is, leaving yourself breadcrumbs to get back into the piece by writing yourself a note at the top of your next blank page that lists 2-3 next steps. Many of my coaching clients swear by the importance of a starting ritual—putting on noise-canceling earphones, lighting a candle, selecting the right, unobtrusive work music—to get writing. I was reminded of my own “starting ritual” earlier today, when I received an email from Martha Beck talking about Turtle Steps. The idea behind Turtle Steps is that you’re only required to take very small steps toward your goal at any one time. This idea resonated with me so much that, while I was writing my dissertation, I actually found a cartoon image of a (very cute) turtle and saved a screenshot of it to my computer. Every time I sat down to work on my dissertation, I opened that image and had it next to me as a talisman of sorts. It reminded me that I need not knock it out of the park every single day. A small step forward is enough.
10) Treat yourself. In No Plot, No Problem, Chris Baty, one of the masterminds behind National Novel Writing Month refers to his writing motivational strategy as “Treat O’Rama.” This has always made me laugh. Because, I mean, why not? Treat yourself! Bribe yourself shamelessly. Get that fancy coffee at the beginning of your work session. Make those protein cookies that will give you energy to write AND taste great!
Is there something you’ve been wanting desperately but you can’t quite justify buying on your doctoral student budget? Make a calendar, commit to X number of work sessions (you can decide how many, depending on how large the reward is) and tell yourself you’ve earned it after you complete that many sessions. The key here, for me, is to tie the reward to the number of sessions worked, not the worked accomplished per se. This may sound counterintuitive (because isn’t the goal to actually finish the thing?) but when earning the prize is tied to finishing the work, it can actually backfire—during a slump, or when you realize you need to go back and read more articles, the prize can feel farther and farther away and you run the risk of giving up on it entirely and just buying the damn thing for yourself, unearned. So, tie the prize to number of sessions (or minutes) worked, and give yourself an on-ramp back to the prize if you get off-schedule (that is, allow yourself to make up sessions if you miss some and still earn the prize). If it motivates you to get your work done, then, in my book it’s worth it!
I hope these strategies have been helpful to you! Let me know if you have questions about any of them or if there are some you’d like to hear more about in future posts!
Happy Writing!
Image by Dusan ververkolag via Unsplash