How to Trick Your Brain Out of Writer’s Block and Write Every Day
Coming from a visual design background, I was constantly baffled about how much of it is open to interpretation. Yet writing is as clear as it gets. A medium without distractions, no sounds or visuals that might have alternative meanings attached, only your eyes and my words, dancing across the screen, trying to make a point as clearly as I am able to articulate it. I never saw myself as a writer, but then, I would go back to old journals, old essays and be far more surprised at that compared to when I looked at my old designs, and that meant something to me. Designs grew old and withered, however, the words seemed as new as ever, alive and relevant but on the voice of a younger self. It was like a peek into the past. Which is when I knew, I should do this more often.
Seth Godin advises it constantly:
“Committing to having a point of view and scheduling a time and place to say something is almost certainly going to improve your thinking, your attitude and your trajectory.
A daily blog is one way to achieve this. Not spouting an opinion or retweeting the click of the day. Instead, outlining what you believe and explaining why.
Commit to articulating your point of view on one relevant issue, one news story, one personnel issue. Every day. Online or off, doesn’t matter. Share your taste and your perspective with someone who needs to hear it.
Speak up. Not just tomorrow, but every day”
If you are anything like me though, sticking to the habit of writing and publishing every day is incredibly daunting. Even though you love the idea of it and perhaps even its complicated process, no matter how well-intentioned you are about making it happen, you keep falling off actually doing it over and over again.
So I decided to put technology on my favor, although it might simultaneously look as if I had turned it against me.
The first thing I did was setting up a commitment to myself. Not a simple empty promise of “I will do this”, but truly committing, with a contract, like a job. A contract? Yes, a contract. With real money at stake.
This way, if I had not to follow through with my contract, I would lose money. My tool of preference is Stickk, I find it straightforward enough and easy to set up, it is also completely free. I don’t understand why there aren’t many more people using this tool and talking about it.
The second most important part of this for me was to get a referee. Someone you trust and who cares about you, who will oversee if you actually committed to doing what you said you were going to do, in this case, writing.
I failed at my first attempt because I didn’t have a referee in place and I would end up lying when it was time to declare if I had kept up with it or not. I tried to self-regulate too many times in the past to know at that point that it wasn’t working. That’s when I realized that I thrive on external accountability and without it, I would keep resorting to the trap of “I’m busy today”, “I can’t do it”, “I’ll just skip today and make up for it tomorrow because I’m too tired”, which never happened.
Third, for me it wasn’t enough to put money on the line. I wanted to do so with the harshest consequences possible. Stickk intensifies the rules of the commitment by allowing you to not only lose money if you don’t achieve what your resolutions were, by giving this money to a friend/foe, Stickk itself, charities but also and most importantly, to give that money to an anti-charity. In my case it was the NRA. One thing is it to lose money, another very different one is to know you’re funding an organization that goes against everything you believe in and hold dear. PS. If you are not sure you can keep up with the project, please don’t make your anti-charity the NRA, because they certainly shouldn’t get a single cent more from anyone ever. Start with something less evil.
By involving morals as a third component along with financial loss and external accountability, the trifecta of “you better get this shit done” becomes a motivation tool like nothing else I’ve tried in the past.
Now, one of my pain points with writing had always been how long I could stare at a blank screen with no ideas coming my way, then move to another tab anxiously as soon as I was bored, with the excuse of research, only to end up 3 hours later having completely lost my train of thought, about to buy tickets for puppy yoga. This was a massive waste of time, as you might imagine, and therefore I would have these massive breakdowns about how slow I was to write and how much I was starting to hate it. The stakes were high but there was no pressure to get it done quickly. Not in the way that my brain trained on gamification needed it.
Here is when The Most Dangerous Writing App came to mind, the fourth step to this system I’ve built for myself. I must have seen it once on Product Hunt and thought it seemed interesting. Then I actually used it, after a very frustrating first couple of attempts where I had lost all my progress.
Essentially the way that this (also free) fantastic desktop app works is by having you set a timer, and have you race through writing your thoughts as fast as possible, no pauses. Leaving you no time to overthink it or edit, which I can assure you is the most productive way of getting it done.
What happens when you stop writing for a moment? Well, after what seems about a second, you lose all of your progress. Paragraph upon paragraph of valuable thoughts lost forever on the abyss. So you better not stop writing next time.
As if that seemed easy enough, you are not allowed to copy your text while the timer is on either, so if you have any sort of bathroom emergency or your cat distracts you for 2 seconds, PUFF! Your text vanishes. Gone, then again, permanently.
For someone who loves games, this is one that keeps me on my toes and allows me to create something out of pure adrenaline. On this post alone I have had my heart skip a beat at least 3 times as for some reason I missed writing for an instant and started seeing the text fade away and the progress bar turning red to indicate that my time was running out, quite literally. My challenge as of now is at 30 minutes.
To do 30 minutes of uninterrupted writing or more is a miracle to me, it is far more than what I would be able to achieve in any other way. For someone whose knee jerk reaction is to multitask, there is not even a chance to look at a different tab for a second with this one, which is why it is so bloody brilliant.
If it sounds a bit masochist, I can confirm that it is.
It’s a bit stressful, but to me it doesn’t compare to the sheer disappointment of looking at a blank screen and having my mind trying to escape it with browsing, social media, going for a snack or any of the many escape routes we are all too familiar with.
Miraculous things happen when you force your brain to just let your thoughts out, unfiltered, raw, as quickly as possible.
It’s dropping your perfectionism out the window and getting something done in the most pragmatic way.
I am as scared of writing something terrible when I’m thinking for 10 minutes straight what the first sentence should be, as when I am racing the clock, so I might as well get it over with fast.
