Some thoughts on Written and The Now Habit
Last week I was queuing up some audiobooks for my trip to California, and I decided to look for books by Oliver Burkeman. Like everybody else, I’ve been a fan of his writing since his landmark book Four Thousand Weeks. That book can be described as a productivity and time-management book unlike any other, in its insistence that the true foundation of a healthy, happy, productive life is in accepting this: the fact that life is distressingly short, and you will never, ever be able to accomplish more than a tiny fraction of what you want to accomplish. Burkeman insists that life goes better when you start by acknowledging the harsh limits of our mortality and, in consciously choosing what to do with each day, fully let go of the rest.
That message has been helpful to me over the past few years, helping me to choose more carefully how I’m going to spend the downhill slope from 40. However, Burkeman was on my mind for a different reason. I knew he’d written at least one other book, a takedown of the way positive psychology has been popularized and debased, and I was curious if he’d written anything else that I didn’t know about.
And he had. In addition to that book, I found another one to which he has contributed a foreword, a book which speaks directly to my current choice of deciding to spend more time writing: Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts, by Bec Evans and Chris Smith.
For me, this book has been exactly the right book for me at the right time. It’s been helping me get back into a practice with my writing without creating artificial demands and constraints around it, without overthinking the process and, importantly, without overvaluing the efforts and products of any given day, week or month.
What I mean by “overvaluing” is a number of bad mental habits, bound up into one ball of neurotic awfulness. Expecting myself to be a genius every time I open a writing app. Expecting myself to produce more than it is possible for me to produce, given the constraints of my busy, adult life. Expecting myself to adhere to a punishing, rigid schedule. And then feeling bad about myself when I don’t measure up to these impossible, self-set standards and expectations.
I’ve fallen into all of these psychological traps, over the 30+ years that I’ve been writing, though not so much over the past decade. But the one thing I perhaps needed to hear most in their opening chapters, was a reminder that it is not actually necessary to write every day for hours in order to produce good writing. For years, that was my only approach. And if I wasn’t writing daily then I wasn’t writing at all.
Of course, even a moment’s reflection will reveal that almost nobody could possibly write in this way. The number of full-time book writers is very small, and even most people who are known for their books fit writing in around their other responsibilities. Routine is important, of course. One does need to come back to the practice on a regular basis. But, as these authors argue, what you need to do is find a schedule, rhythm, or process that works for you. That could look like anything, but if it works for you, then that is the right way — for you. Figure it out, and go all in.
I agree with that perspective completely. In my teens and 20s, I had encountered the gospel of the daily word count. The idea here is to set yourself a target number of words to write (or pages to fill up), and do that every day. It sounds reasonable enough, and in fact it did work in one sense. I did write quite a lot!
But there are two flaws with this approach for me. For one, it’s too rigid a plan to follow strictly for long periods. It may go fine for a week or a month or two, but the rest of life will always interfere. And second, it can come at a psychological price: if you don’t give yourself permission to be less than perfect, it can transform your writing practice from a pleasure into yet another reason to feel bad about yourself. When I inevitably “fell behind” on my word count, I would try to make up the difference over the subsequent days. And then when I failed at that, I’d end up feeling like I was incapable of achieving my writing goals.
This was ridiculous, of course. But I was hypnotized by the idea that writing to a daily word count is the only way to ensure consistent production and, thereby, a career. And so a failure to make my arbitrary, self-set word count felt like a failure to make progress towards my goals. Even if I had gotten pretty close. Even if I’d spent hours at it that day!
So what. A dumb mistake for a smart kid to make. But I was in good company with this kind of thing. According to the authors, Cheryl Strayed was also blocked for years by this misconception that the only way forward is to write daily. For years it didn’t occur to her, or to me, that it’s not actually necessary to write every day in order to write enough, and that word count is not a measure of anything that anyone actually values in writing. It’s not even a proxy measure of anything important. Word count is a useful tool for editors, who use it to estimate various things that concern them. For example, in the case of this blog post, that would be average reading time.
Speaking of which — by my calculation, you’ve spent about 4 minutes reading this far. I thank you for sticking with me for the length of a song! That’s not so easy these days.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been figuring out my writing process this last month or so. What sort of routine, or rhythm, would work alongside all my other activities? That’s my real “writing project” right now.
As promised, I did start an essay a couple Mondays ago — several of them, in fact, as I begin collecting ideas to work on. I’ve resumed collecting them along with quotes in a single place so that I’ll have somewhere to start when writing time comes around. My experience is that if you keep feeding the note file, and keep returning to it, eventually something will blossom into a piece of writing.
This ties into ideas from another book I’ve read recently, Neil Fiore’s Now Habit, which promotes the idea of starting small and regularly. He argues persuasively that setting small commitments on big projects helps to beat procrastination. Don’t worry about the horizon, just commit to working for half an hour right now. If you focus on making low-stakes starts, he says, the finishing will take care of itself. I’m finding that to be quite true, and it’s proven a wise approach with all my projects and interests, including writing, so I’m leaning into those ideas right now. Soon enough, something will emerge from my “atelier.” I just need to give it a little time.
Because for me at least, the fundamentals are there and have been for a long time. I learned to write in my teens and 20s, so the basic mechanics of drafting, line editing, and structuring my work (as well as getting feedback) all feel as comfortable as an old shoe. Right now I’m feeling an intrinsic motivation to write, which has not always been the case in my life.
And although it’s separate, this seems equally important: I’m not intimidated by the publishing process the way I was when I was 20. I have long since achieved the goal of becoming a Published Writer, and all that holds little romantic glamor for me anymore. Which I think is an advantage. From having worked in publishing for years, I know exactly how that aspect of writing works as well. The entire process, from first creation to marketing and publishing, holds no mysteries for me, and I know I am equal to it. All I need at this moment is to find the right routine and rhythm, and keep at it. So here I go.